[lsb-discuss] application certification questions

[Wichmann, Mats D]

lsb-discuss-bounces at lists.freestandards.org wrote:
> Hi all -
> 
> I have a few concerns regarding certifying my app for 3.1.
> 
> 1)  I believe there is a requirement to not install any files outside
> the specified application directory.  I have three issues with this:
>   a) what about installing symbolic links to /usr/bin and /usr/lib?
> What is the alternative here?  I know this has been brought up in the
> past, but didn't see a definitive answer.

not allowed at present.  an amendment would be needed to FHS,
but that group was never willing to budge on that concept.
we've discussed ways to get conforming software into the user's
(and/or the desktop's) search path, and we were working on a tool
which would enable this, but it didn't progress.

>   b) we install a plugin for Mozilla in the Mozilla directory

I can't quite call this my favorite question, but it's one I've
been asking for years without ever getting any traction on it.

>   structure. c) what about the portland project (xdg-utils)
> installing icons? 

these will be fine; they follow an indirect model, which means
your package actually installs the files in your own heirarchy,
then you pass that file to the xdg-utils tool which puts them
in the appropriate place for that distro. To be technically
correct we should probably add wording to allow that, which
we can't do today since xdg-utils is not part of the spec.
But in spirit, this is the sort of thing the LSB wants to allow,
because instead of your package trying to force something into
some global, unspecified, location you instead call a tool which
does the work cleanly and with some efforts to avoid conflicts.

> Are we still certifiable if we install those files outside our
> directory structure? 

I'm not going to directly answer this question because I
don't know.  In the *old* app certification program, the
applicant had to answer a quesionnaire, one of the questions
was whether you installed files outside the FHS-allowed
locations. If the answer was yes, you could not be certified.
But the program has been rewritten and it may not read that
way any longer, I'll leave that to others to comment on.