Packaging Guidelines: /opt

Andy Theuninck andy at gohanman.com
Fri Oct 24 14:09:57 UTC 2008


Thanks for the hints. As far as upstream goes, [as I understand it]
the main goal is to support as many OSes as possible with the default.
And from that prospective, I can understand the advantage of sticking
everything into a single directory.

Moving as much as possible over to /usr/share and symlinking against
the files that are actually needed should be a workable solution (and
maybe an entertaining exercise in bash scripting).

~Andy

2008/10/23 Toshio Kuratomi <a.badger at gmail.com>:
> Andy Theuninck wrote:
>> I'm trying to put a package together for webmin. It wants to install
>> to libexec, but if I do that rpmlint (rightly) complains that there
>> are non-executable text files. Perl files & HTML files are intermixed
>> and separating them out would be a patching nightmare. With a bit of
>> sed scripting, I can coax the whole thing into a different base
>> directory.
>>
> Separating different types of files and getting upstream to accept the
> patches is the right thing to do.
>
> Failing to get buyin from upstream, separating them and symlinking is
> acceptable but not encouraged.
>
> This brief section of the guidelines has useful information about where
> things might belong in this case::
>  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Guidelines#Web_Applications
>
> If you look at moin and other web packages, you'll see that they place a
> lot of files into /usr/share, perhaps how you're intending to use /opt.
>  However, you do have to make sure you aren't putting executables,
> binaries, or files that need to be written there.
>
>> The official packaging guidelines say Fedora follows the Filesystem
>> Hierarchy Standard, and as I read FHS /opt would be the most
>> appropriate place to dump this mess. If I try to use /opt/webmin
>> though, rpmlint pitches a fit about using /opt. Nothing in the
>> guidelines says I can't use /opt. Can I just ignore all these errors?
>>
>
> The FHS says: /opt is reserved for the installation of add-on
> application software packages.
>
> Anything packaged by Fedora is part of the system packaging rather than
> an addon so we stay out of /opt.
>
>> Also, neither the packing guidelines nor FHS make any mention of /var.
>> Maybe that's a more appropriate spot.
>>
> For some content, yes.  But not for the bulk of it.
>
> The Guidelines section I linked to earlier mentions that /var is not the
> place for (most of) these files.
>
> -Toshio
>
>
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