[lsb-discuss] [Printing-architecture] resend notes from lastweek

Christopher Yeoh cyeoh at samba.org
Tue Jul 25 08:51:17 PDT 2006


At 2006/7/25 08:25-0700  Fujinaka, Todd writes:
> >
> >The /opt/<vendor> technique should still work, and for convenience
> >symlinks can be created in /opt/share/ppd and /opt/lib/drivers to the
> >actual files. If you use LANANA, strictly speaking you could just
> >install straight into /opt/share and /opt/lib because you know there
> >won't be any clashes, but I'd still strongly recommend using symlinks
> >instead as it keeps the design simpler and consistent.
> 
> The argument for /opt/printing is a compromise. OpenPrinting wanted to
> put everything in /usr/share and /usr/lib, and I told them that 3rd
> party vendors who add things after the distro should NOT be using /usr
> (at least that was my understanding).
> 
> However, OpenPrinting wants a standard directory for PPDs and drivers,
> so they can tell a 3rd-party vendor that there is one place to look for
> those things. I pointed out that they couldn't touch /usr, and they
> needed /opt/<vendor> and then suggested /opt/printing/<vendor> when the
> first was thought to be too scattered.


Yea, I agree /opt/vendor appears scattered, but symlinking them in
through into /opt/lib/ and /opt/share/ should bring them all together
without the need for adding a special printing directory to /opt. I'd
like to avoid having a special case here unless it can be shown to be
really necessary.

We would of course need agreement from all of the major distributions
before adding this to the FHS.

Note that although 3rd party vendors will only have to install into
one place, applications that look for them will still need to look in
/usr/lib and /usr/local/lib in addition to /opt and at a higher level
someone will need to work out precedence rules (say /usr/local ->
/opt/ -> /usr in order of decreasing importance)

> I had not been able to find an FHS person or active mailing-list to
> bounce these ideas off of and that's another reason that some of these
> suggestions are a bit off.

freestandards-fhs-discuss at lists.sourceforge.net is the best place for
FHS discussions. Apologies if I hadn't responded to you before, but
for some reason SourceForge unsubscribed me from the list and I didn't
realise (I'm an FHS person). We go through periods of not much
activity until there is enough in the queue to justify a new release.

Chris
-- 
cyeoh at au.ibm.com
IBM OzLabs Linux Development Group
Canberra, Australia




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