[Fedora-packaging] broken recommendation for libexecdir

Kay Sievers kay at redhat.com
Thu Feb 9 14:09:23 UTC 2012


Heya,

recommending %{_libdir}/%{name} will result in /usr/lib64/foo/ which is
very broken.

"Application private directories' are for binaries not for libraries and
are not architecture dependent; they must live in /usr/lib, regardless
of the architecture. It is also defined that way by LSB.

In general, we recommend, and all new tools use already, the LSB
defined /usr/lib/<pkgname>/ dir, because libexec/ is entirely forbidden
to use on all other Linux distributions, and we want to share more with
them.

There would be no rush to get rid of libexec in Fedora, it's nothing
wrong with it in general; but recommending it in the packaging
guidelines seems very wrong to me, and against all common sense in
upstream Linux development.

It's a pretty useless Fedora'ism that serves no real purpose and is just
different from everything else. It solves no problem that isn't already
solved since many years.

Thanks,
Kay




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