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

[Matthew Garrett]

On Thu, Dec 20, 2012 at 08:57:58PM -0700, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
> IMHO, libexecdir is not part of this at all... we already have: 
> 
> "If upstream's build scripts support the use of %{_libexecdir} then
> that is the most appropriate place to configure it (eg. passing
> --libexecdir=%{libexecdir}/%{name} to autotools configure). If
> upstream's build scripts do not support that, %{_libdir}/%{name} is a
> valid second choice. "
> 
> It's all about the choice of lib instead of %{_libdir}. 

The problem is that in the absence of libexec, there's no consistent 
location to put helper binaries. %{_libdir}/%{name} doesn't work - 
depending on distribution and architecture, your files are now either in 
lib/name, lib32/name or lib64/name. Far from ideal. Lennart's position 
that fundamental system infrastructure belongs in lib makes sense, since 
there's absolutely no good reason for multilibing those components.

> I'd love to see this changed/fixed down the road, but it's a lot of
> documentation and moving around. 

The situation right now is that it's impossible to write good 
cross-distribution documentation. We should just do it for the sake of 
future ease.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org