[Debian GNUstep maintainers] Re: [Fwd: Re: GNUstep and FHS]

[Hubert Chan]

Hi Gürkan,

Your mail doesn't seem to have been picked up by Gmane, so I'm using the
web archive.  Sorry for breaking the threading...

>>> My sense is that it's much more forgivable to have arch-independent
>>> stuff in /usr/lib than to have arch-dependent stuff in /usr/share.

>Forget it splitting stuff into /usr/lib and /usr/share will break it
>badly.

Even with symlinks?

>The /Network domain must stay at the same place. It must be NFS
>exportable.

We're only talking about Debian packaging, and the Debian packages don't
touch the /Network domain.

>If the urge us to improve. I came up with a fantastic idea how we can
>make more users happy: change the GNUstep root from /usr/lib/GNUstep
>into just / . so we can have our stuff right at /System, /Network and
>/Local.

That's not FHS compliant either, so I don't think people would go for
that.  I think that would be an even less popular idea, since the root
filesystem is supposed to be able to be mounted from smaller media (as
the FHS says).

>>> I'm not sure if it's possible to make GNUstep completely
>>> FHS-compliant.  But if we make it more compliant, it may be more
>>> palatable to any developers who might object to the GNUstep
>>> hierarchy, and make it easier to be granted an exception in policy.

> It's not possible. Why not simply have a tag or something like non-fhs
> (sure it's messy) -> but some people just don't give a shit about FHS
> - frankly.

On the other hand, some people do, and it's a release-critical bug in
Debian to not follow FHS. :-(

>> After reflexion, I think if we just use /usr/lib/GNUstep and
>> /usr/lib/GNUstep we can easily improve the FHS compliance (but not
>> fully). Using symlinks we can preserve the GNUstep hierarchy.
>> Gürkan, what do you think ?

> Symlinks are a mess, they don't exist on some systems. Sure, you can
> now say Debian doesn't support systems that don't support
> symlinks. ...

Again, we're just talking about Debian packaging here.  We're not
talking about changing the way upstream packages things (AFAICT).  Of
course it would be nice if upstream supported us somehow (e.g. by making
it easier to move some things around), if we need to do something
different from the way they do things by default, but I think that
upstream should stick to their filesystem layout.

> currently it's the FHS issue, if that is solved, i'd be glad when you
> helped with packaging gnustep software and also apply to get DD so you
> can sponsor gnustep packages ;)

Well, the way the NM process seems to be going these days, it probably
won't be at least for another year. :-/

P.S.  I'm away until Aug 13 without network access, so don't expect to
hear from me until then.

-- 
Hubert Chan <hubert at uhoreg.ca> - http://www.uhoreg.ca/
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