Status and outlook of LSB and FHS compliance of Fedora.

[Aaron Bennett]

Phil Knirsch wrote:
> Hi folks.
> 
> I've been looking at how well Fedora is compliant with the latest LSB 
> and FHS specifications lately.
> 

What about /opt?  From the FHS 2.3 document 
http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#PURPOSE14 , it's seems that 
all of Fedora's optional packages need to install into /opt/<packagename>.

That's actually the Solaris way as well as, according to the "Rationale" 
  part of this section, "a well establish practice in the UNIX community."

I used to make a living packaging things for Solaris, and Sun's 
packaging standard clearly states that all add-on software goes to /opt.

I've always hated it.  Largely because have /opt/gnome/ , /opt/apache , 
/opt/kde , etc starts to generate PATH variables that are horrible. 
However, the nice thing about that is it avoids this sort of thing:

[abennett at burton abennett]$ cd /usr/bin
[abennett at burton bin]$ ls | wc -l
2404

2,404 files are in /usr/bin on my FC2 system!

Anyhow, if we are all taking about /svr, we should be talking about /opt 
and the rest of the FHS.  I've never seen any RedHat product pay 
attention to /opt.  Let's decide about both things -- there's little 
point in disrupting 90% of our users to achieve 50% FHS compliance.

- Aaron


-- 
Aaron Bennett
UNIX Administrator
Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering