[Guidelines Change] Changes to the Packaging Guidelines

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On 7 February 2012 02:04, Bohuslav Kabrda <bkabrda at redhat.com> wrote:
> ________________________________
>
>
>
> On Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 2:08 PM, Bohuslav Kabrda <bkabrda at redhat.com> wrote:
>>
>> Yes, Ralf says how a sentence from FHS "is meant to be interpreted". I'm
>> giving you a clear statement, that distributions may install software into
>> /opt. Is the interpretation that Ralf is mentioning an official
>> interpretation of FHS authors? Because if not, you are clearly preferring
>> your interpretations over a clear statement. Or is there something more that
>> I don't see?\
>
>
> Yes.  I said, see the quote.  Not the interpretation.  If you see the quote,
> you can tell us how you interpret it. It might also be a useful exercise
> to look at how other distributions interpret it as well.   What does add-on
> software mean?   If you want to get a official interpretation, talk to
> whoever is supposedly trying to revise it now.
>
> Rahul
>
>
> Yes, I know the quote, it was me who quoted it in the first place. Add-on
> application software packages can mean almost anything, which is precisely
> my point - you interpret it in a very narrow way, and you are not accepting
> any comments on it. As for the other distributions, I thought we want to do
> something better/different. Other distributions do not do usrmove and we do,
> so what is the point in arguing with that?
>

tldr(1): You are fighting 15 years of historical packaging and
assumptions that  outside vendors rely on.
tldr(2): Packagers get one big break per release. /usr/move is it.
Move along til next release.

The historical context goes as follows:

The Red Hat rule from 1996->2001 was "packages do not put stuff into
/opt, /usr/local, or /srv." Like all Red Hat rules it was broken, and
every time it was there was a support nightmare. By 1999 it was
checked for explicitly by various scripts because of that. This rule
was further enhanced by quoting the FHS and taken into account by
Fedora packaging later.

Due to the fact that Red Hat and Fedora have been interpreting the
rule that way for a very very long time, local system administrators
and software vendors are very likely to use /opt for their own things
in either Solaris format (/opt/<packagename>/) or similar means
(/opt/fedoraproject/<packagename>, /opt/fedora.. ,)  Vendors are very
likely to be the ones most likely to drop stuff in /opt in various
ways (/opt/jboss is a favourite even if they aren't jboss upstream).

The fact that packages in Fedora may end up being Red Hat packages at
some point means that we have to be very very careful about not
breaking some compatibility. [Breaking /usr is going to be a fun one
to deal with but I no longer work with GSS so will just listen to
their screams from afar.]





> --
> Regards,
> Bohuslav "Slavek" Kabrda.
>
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-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.
"The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance."
Randy Nelson, President of Pixar University.
"Years ago my mother used to say to me,... Elwood, you must be oh
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recommend pleasant. You may quote me."  —James Stewart as Elwood P. Dowd