[clue-tech] Proper files storage etiquette?

[dennisjperkins at comcast.net]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Angelo Bertolli" <angelo.bertolli at gmail.com> 
To: "CLUE technical discussion" <clue-tech at cluedenver.org> 
Sent: Wednesday, April 1, 2009 8:11:27 AM GMT -07:00 US/Canada Mountain 
Subject: Re: [clue-tech] Proper files storage etiquette? 

Red Mop wrote: 
> On Tuesday 31 March 2009 10:09:18 pm Angelo Bertolli wrote: 
> 
>> On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 8:26 PM, Collins Richey <crichey at gmail.com> wrote: 
>> 
>>> On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 11:39 PM, David L. Anselmi <anselmi at anselmi.us> 
>>> 
>>> wrote: 
>>> 
>>>> Collins Richey wrote: 
>>>> 
>>>>> On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 10:24 PM, David L. Anselmi 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>>> The FHS tries to standardize things in a way that makes sense. 
>>>>>> 
>>>>> their "makes sense" rules make it extremely difficult to house 
>>>>> multiple versions of KDE/Gnome in the /usr structure 
>>>>> 
>>>> Can you elaborate on that? I'm not sure KDE/Gnome packages expect to 
>>>> co-exist with other versions. 
>>>> 
>>> What Shawn said. KDE/Gnome may not expect this, but lots of Gentoo 
>>> users prefer to tinker with new upgrades in a sandbox without 
>>> destroying their functional setup. By violating the FHS rules (this 
>>> particular rule is lame IMO), they make it brain dead simple. 
>>> 
>> What rule exactly does this violate? Or maybe, how does it violate a rule? 
>> As long as you have /usr there, the rule is satisfied, no? I would even go 
>> as far as to say a symlink from /usr to something would count. 
>> 
> 
> shawn at onceler /usr/kde/3.5 $ ls 
> bin env etc include lib share shutdown 
> 
> 
> Those directories are normally found elsewhere. bin is supposed to 
> be /usr/bin, etc is supposed to be /etc, etc. That's why it violates the 
> FHS. 
> 

I don't know. If you don't actually have another /usr/bin, then I see 
what you mean. But if these are just extra directories, I'm not sure 
this counts as a violation. It looks just like /usr/local/* to me, with 
different directory names. 


Angelo 
_______________________________________________ 

The FHS codifies existing practice. It specifies the filesystem layout that any Linux system should have. The intent is to make it easier for package developers to create that packages that will install into the correct locations. FHS recommends that any packages installed by the user go into /opt or /usr/local. In other words, the goal again is "it just works". This is the purpose of standardization. 

You can ignore that, of course, but you might find that you need to set some system variables, like PKG_CONFIG_PATH, for things to work right. You might also find some paths are hard-coded, which is not so good. Making sure you do not have conflicting files in /etc is very important. 

Xorg recently changed their preferred location from /usr/local/X11R6 to /usr/bin. Sun has stated that they will still install Xorg into the old location. Linux distros seem to be accepting the new location. 

For a long time, I compiled GNOME into /usr/gnome. Apart from a few tweaks, it worked fine. You could also try /usr/bin/gnome, /usr/lib/gnome, etc., but that takes more work. I don't know how to coerce a package manager into installing into different locations, but I imagine it is not difficult. 

If you want to run multiple versions of KDE or GNOME, you also need to change your paths to make sure the right programs are called. 
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