[Fedora-packaging] FHS being ignored

[Till Maas]

On Mon, Jun 28, 2010 at 01:34:45PM +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> On 06/23/2010 04:45 PM, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> > Ralf Corsepius (rc040203 at freenet.de) said:
> >>>> Another FHS violation has made it into Fedora:
> >>>> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=606854
> >>>
> >>> Its a pseudo-filesystem, akin to /proc
> >>
> >> =>  /var/<somewhere>
> >
> > Won't work. /var can be a separate filesystem, cgroup filesystem
> > may need to be available as boot.
> Design flaw?

This is a design flaw of the FHS, which does not only affect cgroup but
any software that needs variable runtime storage before /var is mounted.

Afaik in debian using /lib/<package name>/ is an acceptable violation
of the FHS to work around this FHS limitation. I would also like to have
some opinion what to do in this case in general in Fedora.

The package of mine that is affected by this is pam_mount, which
includes a mount.crypt helper script to easily mount LUKS encrypted
volumes. It needs to store additional information somewhere it used to
use /etc/cmtab, but then moved to use /var/run/pam_mount/cmtab or
similiar, which breaks mount /var using mount.crypt. But more
importantly it may break umounting of partitions, because /var might be
unmounted in Fedora before other mount.crypt mounted partitions were
unmounted. At least this already happened with /usr being unmounted too
early in the past.

Regards
Till
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