File Systems.

Jochem Huhmann joh at gmx.net
Sun Mar 19 21:44:17 PST 2000


* Erik Troan <ewt at redhat.com> wrote:
> I strongly suspect Red Hat's users would hate it if we started littering
> /opt with things from our distribution. /usr is correct for packages that
> come with the operating system, /opt is correct for 3rd party packages, and
> /usr/local should be left alone for system administrator's use.

We agree on that: /usr is correct for packages that come with the
operating system. I would like to hear from you (or from the LSB
actually) *what* is considered to belong to the operating system.  So,
what parts of Redhat (Caldera, Debian, Mandrake, SuSE, ...) belong to
the "operating system" and what parts are distributed 3rd party
software? Again: Is Netscape part of the OS?

Avoiding an answer to this question is an answer on its own. Making LSB
useful is IMHO not possible without defining what the system is and if
you do so, additional software is additional software distributed as a
set with the OS, but not part of the OS.

> Let's standardize the well-accepted tenets of Linux. They've evolved for
> a reason, 20 million people are comfortable with them, and it will speed
> the adoption of the LSB.

/usr/local has evolved from the need to tell the OS and manually
installed software apart, yes. I do strongly believe that a clear
distinction between OS and additional software is something that is
missing in Linux since it started to use package managers. There is only
/usr/local (for manually installed stuff) but there is no way to
separate "installed with the OS" and "installed as additional software
with the package manager" and to clearly identify the operating
system. Otherwise there wouldn't have been a need for discussing the
scope of LSB at all.


        Jochem

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