Exceptions for packages placing files into /bin, /sbin, /lib or /lib64

[Jaroslav Skarvada]

According to the packaging guidelines [1] packages for F17+ must not
place files or directories into /bin, /sbin, /lib or /lib64.
But it seems it is not possible with glibc [2] (and maybe others), thus
I propose adding exceptions list to the guidelines

thanks & regards

Jaroslav

[1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Guidelines#Filesystem_Layout
[2] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=860579

[Rex Dieter]

Jaroslav Skarvada wrote:
> According to the packaging guidelines [1] packages for F17+ must not

It's probably a safe first start to insert a "new" in there.

"... new packages for F17+  must not..."

old stuff is oftentimes grandfathered.

-- rex

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Mon, Oct 01, 2012 at 02:10:08PM -0500, Rex Dieter wrote:
> Jaroslav Skarvada wrote:
> > According to the packaging guidelines [1] packages for F17+ must not
>
> It's probably a safe first start to insert a "new" in there.
>
> "... new packages for F17+  must not..."
>
> old stuff is oftentimes grandfathered.

I don't think this one was grandfathered....

My understanding of the Usrmove feature is that /bin /sbin potentially no
longer exist.  We create symlinks for backwards compatibility but at some
level we need to be designing for those to go away.

If the linker must be in /sbin/ then I'm not sure we should have gone ahead
with UsrMove....

Not 100% sure what we need to do about that now.  From a practical
standpoint, removing the symlinks won't happen for a very, very long time.
However, someone might propose that we do so to clean up cruft at some point
in the distant future and if the linker still needs to be in /sbin/ then
we'll encounter that breakagee then.

UsMove could be reverted (FESCo decision).

We could break ABI and recompile everything to use the new path and be
unhappily aware that precompiled binaries for other Linux systems won't work
on Fedora and vice versa (glibc + releng decision).

We could grant an exception for the linker and somehow document that
although UsrMove ha gone through, the compatiblity symlinks can never ever
go away (FPC + FESCo decision).

-Toshio

[Matthew Miller]

On Tue, Oct 02, 2012 at 09:51:33AM -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> We could grant an exception for the linker and somehow document that
> although UsrMove ha gone through, the compatiblity symlinks can never ever
> go away (FPC + FESCo decision).

+1 to this option. Making /bin and /sbin go away completely is not part of
the "Benefit to Fedora" for the feature. (In fact, it's not listed as all.)
In fact, since a huge amount of documentation and a great number of scripts
refer to binaries located there, the cost of removing them is quite high and
the value (for what, to make / look pretty?) is quite low.