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

[Adam Williamson]

On Fri, 2012-12-21 at 12:30 -0500, Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 20, 2012 at 09:16:00PM -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
> > I've never seen any distro take any notice of this standard whatsoever.
> 
> Well, if you don't count Red Hat Linux, Fedora, and Red Hat Enterprise
> Linux....

I should probably have been more precise about that, but what I meant
was this: I've been following this list for several years now and not
once in any of the many and colorful arguments we have about path names
and locations do I recall anyone citing this GNU filesystem 'standard'.
I don't recall it coming up once in the /usr move saga, for instance.

An archive search shows I'm slightly wrong, but not very much so:

https://www.google.ca/search?q="gnu coding standards"+site%3Ahttps%3A%2F
%2Flists.fedoraproject.org%2Fpipermail%2Fdevel

it appears to have been cited in about 10 threads since 2004. And most
of those in a 'it's an interesting reference but nothing we have to
follow' sort of way. Indeed, in an earlier discussion on this topic,
Toshio wrote explicitly that we don't consider GCS as canonical:

"to be clear the GNU coding standards are not definitive for Fedora like
the FHS is at this time; I'm including the quotation to show what
current best practices are in this regard"

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2011-June/152343.html

In passing, a post from Toshio back in February explains rather more
clearly than anything in this thread why systemd unit files shouldn't go
in libexec anyway, and so why this whole side-thread is kind of
irrelevant:

"So I have to admit here that I have no idea why systemd is using
$libexecdir here.  The definition of libexecdir does not support the
storing of unit files...unit files are declarative, not executable.  It
sounds like upstream systemd wants to use $(exec_prefix)/lib/systemd for
the unit files and is attempting to shoehorn those into libexecdir
because some distros set libexecdir to ${exec_prefix}/lib whereas some
distros on some arches set libdir to ${exec_prefix}lib64  This is
incorrect use of libexecdir.  They should just use ${exec_prefix}/lib if
that is the place that makes the most sense."

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2012-February/163024.html
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
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