[lsb-discuss] /etc naming conventions buggy

Wichmann, Mats D mats.d.wichmann at intel.com
Fri Jan 18 17:41:47 PST 2008


lsb-discuss-bounces at lists.linux-foundation.org wrote:
> I have tried hard to submit a problem report, but failed:
> 
>  I click "Problem Reporting", it gives me a list of closed issues.
>  I click the "Login" link just above the list of closed issues, it
>  doesn't offer to create an account and just says login failed.
>  I return to the main LSB page, which offers (at the top of the page)
>  a "Login / create account" link.  The resulting page allows
> logging in
>  but doesn't allow creating an account.

Sorry about that.  There's been a lot of work towards unifying
authentication across the Linux Foundation domains, but it
does not extend to bugzilla. (I'm not sure what the "Problem
Reporting" link is, what page was that from?)

For LSB problem reporting, please go to bugs.linuxbase.org.
bugs.linux-foundation.org is actually a separate bugtracker for
some historical reasons (plus the fact that there are enough
LSB bugs, adding other stuff would really complicate the
generation of useful statistics on LSB bug trends)

> Please run a spell checker over LSB.  (E.g. `implemetnations'.)

It's a good idea, but pretty hard to implemetn :-).  The LSB specification
is maintained in docbook source, plus it's loaded with terms that
are not dictionary words.  Seems like aspell has at least some
support that could help with the former issue, and of course those
words can be added to the local dictionary. I could also spell-check
a generated document (the .txt version), although correlating that
back to the source is a lot of work.  I'll put this on the work queue.

> §16.2.1 'File Naming Conventions' conflicts with existing practice:
> 
> /etc/init.d is one of the above locations, i.e. is subject to these
> rules, but names like `checkfs.sh' don't match any of the
> alternatives

Yes, this looks to be somewhat broken, although I've never seen
an initscript named "[something].sh". Over the years there have been
several cracks taken at this wording, by many different people.
The underlying idea is that things that don't come from the distro 
should be named in such a way as to not conflict with distro-provided
scripts. It would be better if the initscripts used by distros fit into
the "assigned names" bucket but there hasn't been any effort that I
know of to manipulate that list over the years; the original list
was in place over six years ago when I first looked at it and we have
a relatively old bug that points out that there's really no description
of what those reserved names mean either
(see http://bugs.linuxbase.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1279)

>Finally, I suggest summarizing all the rules into a POSIX extended
>regexp, to help those writing tools to check that these rules are
>followed.  (E.g. at least one implementation of install_initd tries
>to check that the given name is reasonable, though the check in the
>instance I've seen doesn't match the rules given here.)

We have a tool (lsbpkgchk) which would also benefit from such
a rule. In checking a package, it tries to verify the paths follow
the rules as one step; at the moment it's got a very blunt knife,
shall we say, and doesn't really look at this kind of detail.

So... thanks for dropping in, and let's keep kicking this around until
we figure out how to improve this section.




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