[fhs-discuss] FHS/LSB Updates

Mats Wichmann mats at wichmann.us
Wed Nov 16 19:30:09 UTC 2011


On 11/16/2011 12:14 PM, Ingo Schwarze wrote:
> Hi Bruce,
>
> Bruce Dubbs wrote on Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 12:51:01PM -0600:
>
>> The last I looked, LSB Core required several programs that seem to
>> me to be obsolete:  'cpio', 'ed', 'at', and 'batch' come to mind.
>> I have not seen those in active use in the last 10 years or so.
>
> What, obsolete?
>
>   - at(1) and batch(1) are POSIX and not marked obsolete.
>     I use them daily at work, and we ship them, enabled,
>     to tens of thousands of customer machines on SLES 11.

indeed, if you install the package for Chrome, it fires off an at job so 
even "modern" applications may use it :)

>   - While i'm not sure whether there is a standard for cpio(1)
>     except the LSB, i consider a tool people have get used to.
>     I use at about monthly, most often in conjunction with
>     rpm2cpio(1).
>
>   - While ed(1) is arguably used rarely, it's POSIX as well,
>     it is not marked obsolete either, and there are still systems
>     around where it's the only editor you have, e.g. the OpenBSD
>     installation image.
>
>> Occasionally I have seen ed or cpio them used when trying to install
>> a very dated package (last century), but I do not recall any use of
>> 'at' or 'batch'.

I'm quite willing to admit to being a dinosaur but I do use cpio from 
time to time to make sure a transfer of a file tree gets done as I want. 
Although I believe rsync (which is not in LSB) does just as well.

There was some effort to try to converge tar and cpio into pax, such 
that the requirements would be "one required tool, correctly handles 
both file formats".  I don't think that really got as much traction as 
the people who named it thought it would.

>> I'm not suggesting that distros drop them, but I wouldn't think that
>> people who rely on the FHS/LSB would really need them.
>
> Well, as far as i understand, the LSB builds on POSIX, so to have
> ed, at, and batch around is not an additional requirement imposed
> by the FHS.

That's correct for LSB; continuing to track POSIX and it does 
occasionally obsolete commands. FHS doesn't require LSB though, it's 
more the other way around.



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