[fhs-discuss] tighten the use and intention of the "/var" hierarchy

[Tollef Fog Heen]

]] Matthew Miller 

| On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 09:19:09AM +0200, Tollef Fog Heen wrote:
| > There is no keeping /var/www, it's not in the FHS.
| 
| If we want the FHS to actually be relevant and accepted by anyone, it has to
| codify and clarify existing conventions. /var/www might not be the best
| place, but it's got a pretty serious legacy in both Red Hat and Debian
| distributions, and their derivatives. We can _say_ that the standard is
| beautiful rainbow unicorn ponies, but everyone is just going to ignore us.

RHEL/Fedora «recently» changed to using /var/www (meaning it changed in
the last five years or so. :-), previous to that it was just used in
Debian.  I'll admit to being ignorant of they changing, so perhaps we
should consider putting /var/www down as the default docroot.  The
problem of course being «what happens to a customised
/var/www/index.html when whatever package providing the default one is
upgraded?».

| Any meaningful revision to the standard needs to take that into account.

Sure.

| If you want to gradually steer people to a better location than /var/www,
| the FHS might be a place for _some_ of that advocacy, but since this isn't a
| law-making organization (and not even an official standards body), it's
| probably best taken up as the last place to address such concerns, not the
| place to start.

Personally, I like /srv/$vhost/www, but given the definition of /srv, I
don't think we can mandate that as a default location.

Some problems with a default docroot (_any_ default docroot) is:

- The admin will install stuff there, which means you don't want to
overwrite their files with bits from packages.

- You want to make installing a package (say, phpbb) to integrate and
set up with the existing web site, but maybe not for all vhosts

- Some admins don't want the integration, because they've got a
customised version with patched files installed already.

- Web apps sometimes need customisations for theming or other
site-specific work, meaning you can't magically insert a new version
into the docroot and expect it to be a graceful upgrade.

Yes, this all sucks, and I don't have a great solution, apart from «ship
what you can and provide configs that can be symlinked into apache's
config and a tree that can be copied into /srv/$hostname/www somehwere»,
which isn't particularly great.

Regards,
-- 
Tollef Fog Heen
UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are