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

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On 20 December 2012 22:16, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 2012-12-21 at 06:09 +0100, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
>> On 12/21/2012 05:54 AM, Matthew Garrett wrote:
>> > On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 05:38:17AM +0100, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
>> >
>> >> I disagree. systemd simply hasn't taken libexecdir into account in
>> >> its design and now is trying to propagate their oversight/mistake as
>> >> "standard" instead of making their works compliant with _our_
>> >> distro's demands.
>> >
>> > libexec doesn't exist in any published version of the FHS,
>>
>> FHS != GCS
>>
>> http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html#Directory-Variables
>>
>> IIRC, it's around there for at approx 20 years.
>
> I've never seen any distro take any notice of this standard whatsoever.
> This is in fact the first reference I've seen to it in any context.

The historical reason that Red Hat/Fedora used /usr/libexec and
various other oddities was to conform to the GCS in Red Hat's early
days. A file standard needed to be chosen that worked for things and
GCS was setup for all the GNU tools. RPM was then coded to be GCS
friendly etc etc.

That said, the need to keep following the FHS, GCS, or the
JanitorsFileLayoutStandard is up to FESCO after a reasoned debate..
which seems fairly lacking on everyone's side at the moment. Go take a
week off and come back in January. Or better yet, how about going
outside the Fedora bubble and conversing with the relevant people in
Debian, SuSE, etc and getting FHS back on track because we are all
having the same issues about this and we keep solving them seperately
versus together.

-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.
"Don't derail a useful feature for the 99% because you're not in it."
Linus Torvalds
"Years ago my mother used to say to me,... Elwood, you must be oh
so smart or oh so pleasant. Well, for years I was smart. I
recommend pleasant. You may quote me."  —James Stewart as Elwood P. Dowd