[Pkg-xen-devel] Bug#668641: Bug#668641: Bug#668641: Bug#668641: Please add a symlink /usr/lib/xen -> /usr/lib/xen-default

[Thomas Goirand]

On 04/14/2012 05:52 PM, Bastian Blank wrote:
> You failed to describe, why you want it.

Hi Bastian,

If Guido failed, let me try then, since this impacted me multiple times
as well. Hoping that this time, I'll succeed in convincing you.

What we need is a /usr/lib/xen so that Debian isn't an exception, and
that in the general case (eg: in all other cases but with your package),
the folder is there. Every other distributions (Xen from upstream
sources, Fedora, Gentoo, Arch, CentOS, and maybe more) have this folder.

When designing a software for Xen, we don't want to have to handle a
specific case for Debian, where /usr/lib/xen is called another way. We
don't want either to have to patch some upstream code that may be using
/usr/lib/xen if we want to package it in Debian.

Having /usr/lib/xen being the currently running hypervisor is what we
want here (eg: we might need it at runtime, I don't see any cases where
we would need it at build time, but I might be wrong).

For example, someone might want to access things under /usr/lib/xen/bin,
or the hvmloader. Or libxenlight.so (which is a public API that isn't in
/usr/lib, so it might need a RPATH, which here is specific to Debian).

If you want to achieve this by dropping the use of Xen visioning, then
I'm all for it, as I don't think it adds anything (unlike the kernel,
Xen doesn't hold drivers that sometimes would fail, and an upgrade to a
newer version should always work(tm), and I don't see any cases where we
would need to have 2 versions of Xen installed on a system at any given
time). But any ways is ok as long as we can use /usr/lib/xen to find
what we are supposed to expect in there.

Hoping that this time, you will understand this need to not break things,

Thanks for your work on Xen,
Cheers,

Thomas

P.S: It'd be btw really great if you could upload your fix the not
starting xend depending on the used $TOOLSTACK (I saw it in the SVN,
which is cool!). It's been overdue for more than 4 months now, and
multiple patches has been sent to you to address it.