Summary/Minutes for today's FESCo meeting (2012-12-19)

[Lennart Poettering]

On Thu, 20.12.12 12:02, Toshio Kuratomi (a.badger at gmail.com) wrote:

> On Thu, Dec 20, 2012 at 02:28:48PM +0000, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> > On Thu, Dec 20, 2012 at 01:54:57AM +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> > > On Wed, Dec 19, 2012 at 11:56:36PM +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> > > 
> > > > Yuck! I really don't see why we should be granting this type of exceptions. 
> > > > libexec and share exist for a reason. Helper binaries need to be in libexec, 
> > > > unit files in share, I think allowing systemd to dump everything (and in 
> > > > particular 64-bit stuff) to lib is setting a horrible precedent.
> > > 
> > > Unit files need to be in /, so moving them would either require creating 
> > > a /share for distributions that haven't merged /usr or putting up with 
> > > inconsistent naming between distributions. Consistency is a virtue and 
> > > the chances of getting anyone else to accept /share are minimal, so /lib 
> > > it is. Meanwhile, libexec's not part of any non-draft version of the FHS 
> > > and doesn't exist on most other distributions, and the path of the 
> > > helper binaries has ended up in a bunch of unit files. So, similar 
> > > problems.
> > > 
> > > What benefit do you see in modifying systemd?
> > 
> > Can someone summarise the trac ticket:
> > 
> >   https://fedorahosted.org/fpc/ticket/158
> > 
> > and the above reply, because none of it seems to make much sense to me.
> > 
> The effect of this is:
> 
> FPC will write into the Guidelines (probably where libexec is mentioned
> since that's where the note about being able to use %{_libdir} as an
> alternative to %{_libexecdir} is ) that the systemd helper binaries and
> unitfiles have been granted a special exception to install into
> %{_prefix}/lib instead of %{_libdir}.
> 
> This should mean that nothing changes in the systemd packages or in packages
> which provide unitfiles.  They are already installing into those locations.

I'd much prefer if FPC/FESCO would actually just do the right thing,
forget about libexec (since it's a pointless, sometimes dangerous,
confused thing and not available on any other distribution), and declare
that lib/<package> is the place for package-specific stuff and
share/<package> the place that is shared between packages.

Just making systemd the exception sounds like chickening out from the
real solution which is to end this Fedoraism.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.