FHS question

[Tom Allison]

I was trolling through the Debain Policy Manual and then the referenced FHS
and came up wit a question.

This is just an example.

openoffice is installed from .debs that I obtained (I believe) from a
non-debian sanctioned location:
deb [url]http://ftp.sk.debian.org/openoffice-debian/[/url] stable main contrib
deb [url]http://ftp.freenet.de/pub/ftp.vpn-junkies.de/openoffice/[/url] stable main contrib

'which openoffice' tells me that these packages installed into
/usr/bin/openoffice

FHS says that this directory is for "binaries not needed in single user mode".
But then I went over and looked at the /opt which also seemed rather
reasonable as a place to put things.

It also seems a heck of a lot easier to manage the installation and (more
importantly) the removal of software through the /opt structure.

I am wondering if someone could explain to me why /opt isn't used much if at
all and under when circumstances it would be expected to be used, or not.

I have also noticed that a bried test-drive with SuSE indicated that they
love putting everything in the world into /opt, but again I don't really
understand the reasoning behind it or what the advantages/disadvantages might be.

My guess is that some of this comes down to nfs mounting applications, but
I'm not even sure about that.

--
Ralph's Observation:
It is a mistake to let any mechanical object realise that you
are in a hurry.


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[Colin Watson]

On Fri, Aug 01, 2003 at 02:35:44AM -0400, Tom Allison wrote:

> FHS says that this directory is for "binaries not needed in single user
> mode".
> But then I went over and looked at the /opt which also seemed rather
> reasonable as a place to put things.
>
> It also seems a heck of a lot easier to manage the installation and (more
> importantly) the removal of software through the /opt structure.
>
> I am wondering if someone could explain to me why /opt isn't used much if
> at all and under when circumstances it would be expected to be used, or not.

Debian prefers to leave /opt for the system administrator. Since we have
dpkg, there's no need to worry about ease of installation or removal;
you should be using the package management tools to do that anyway.

Cheers,

--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]


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[Tom Allison]

Colin Watson wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 01, 2003 at 02:35:44AM -0400, Tom Allison wrote:
>

>>FHS says that this directory is for "binaries not needed in single user
>>mode".
>>But then I went over and looked at the /opt which also seemed rather
>>reasonable as a place to put things.
>>
>>It also seems a heck of a lot easier to manage the installation and (more
>>importantly) the removal of software through the /opt structure.
>>
>>I am wondering if someone could explain to me why /opt isn't used much if
>>at all and under when circumstances it would be expected to be used, or not.

>
>
> Debian prefers to leave /opt for the system administrator. Since we have
> dpkg, there's no need to worry about ease of installation or removal;
> you should be using the package management tools to do that anyway.
>
> Cheers,
>

I concede that this is Debians choice in configuration.

Wouldn't it be possible to utilize /opt for big packages (open office,
mozilla, KDE, Gnome, Java) and still leave /opt for system administrators?

I kind of like the idea of putting what you need for the basics in /usr and
the cool applications in /opt and spread it around a little bit.

I guess there's really no valid reason for going one way or the other but
that it's more important to have an agreed to schema when setting up files.

--
Kennedy's Market Theorem:
Given enough inside information and unlimited credit,
you've got to go broke.


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[Todd Pytel]

Tom,

On Fri, 01 Aug 2003 07:18:45 -0400
Tom Allison <tallison@tacocat.net> wrote:

> Wouldn't it be possible to utilize /opt for big packages (open office,
>
> mozilla, KDE, Gnome, Java) and still leave /opt for system
> administrators?
>
> I kind of like the idea of putting what you need for the basics in
> /usr and the cool applications in /opt and spread it around a little
> bit.

I can't speak for Debian, because I've only been using it about 6
months, but most of the big distributions used to do exactly what you
described - there would be /opt/gnome, /opt/kde, /opt/openoffice, and so
on. What happened, especially as the projects became more mature, is
that a lot of cross-dependencies developed - Galeon used Mozilla, and
lots of things used GTK, for example. Then the "tidy" directory
structure became a horrible mess for compile time configuration, the
$PATH variable stretched out for miles and required maintenance, and
basically the whole tidy structure only served to hide dependencies and
relationships that actually existed. Better to toss everything in /usr
and forego human-readable browsing for the sake of an efficient system.
Trust in the package manager to keep track of things for you.

--Todd


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[Karsten M. Self]

on Fri, Aug 01, 2003 at 07:18:45AM -0400, Tom Allison (tallison@tacocat.net) wrote:

> Colin Watson wrote:

> >On Fri, Aug 01, 2003 at 02:35:44AM -0400, Tom Allison wrote:
> >

> >>FHS says that this directory is for "binaries not needed in single
> >>user mode". But then I went over and looked at the /opt which also
> >>seemed rather reasonable as a place to put things.
> >>
> >>It also seems a heck of a lot easier to manage the installation and
> >>(more importantly) the removal of software through the /opt
> >>structure.
> >>
> >>I am wondering if someone could explain to me why /opt isn't used
> >>much if at all and under when circumstances it would be expected to
> >>be used, or not.

> >
> >
> >Debian prefers to leave /opt for the system administrator. Since we
> >have dpkg, there's no need to worry about ease of installation or
> >removal; you should be using the package management tools to do that
> >anyway.
> >
> >Cheers,
> >

>
> I concede that this is Debians choice in configuration.

Specifically: it's Policy. The S.A. is assured that nothing under /opt
will be modified by the packaging system.

> Wouldn't it be possible to utilize /opt for big packages (open office,
> mozilla, KDE, Gnome, Java) and still leave /opt for system administrators?

What you'll find in Debian is that packages with large quantities of
related files will create a subdirectory under /usr/lib or /usr/share
for components, for arch-dependent and arch-independent files,
respectively. See Debian Policy 10.7.3.

Peace.

--
Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> [url]http://kmself.home.netcom.com/[/url]
What Part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
Data corrupts. Absolute data corrupts absolutely.
-- Ed Self's corollary of Atkinson's Law.

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