Re: [MiNT] Sparemint and FHS

[Guido Flohr <gufl0000@stud.uni-sb.de>]

On Mon, Sep 06, 1999 at 11:00:30PM +0300, Martin-Eric Racine wrote:
> > I think you should re-read what I wrote - *your* stuff works fine with
> > *your* FHS-setup. But it won't work with updated utmp/wtmp in the
> > FHS-recommended paths, you'll have to rebuild your programs again.
> 
> The utmp/wtmp __format__, yes indeed, but then no mather which path 
> we use, every package will have to be rebuilt to comply. Still, the 
> path is already FHS-compliant, even using the current format, here.

Maybe you should reread what I have written: The utmp format will
change and this will lead to incompatibilities in any case, there will be
a migration period.  During this migration period, your "FHS-compliant"
programs will mess up the utmp/wtmp database (because they will use the
old format).  If you had a little patience (please look up "patience" in
the dictionary or do you know that term?) and followed the principle I
suggested (old format -> old paths, new format -> new paths) then you
would only have a loss of information during that period, but at least no
program will crash because it reads/writes a corrupted database.  Remember
that init, login or getty are programs that are likely to crash in that
case, and that may lead to an unbootable system.

As for /usr/man vs. /usr/share/man: Yes, it is easy to change and it will
be changed as soon as we are sure that this is free of side-effects but I
really want to avoid that people have difficulties finding their manpages.
Same for /usr/doc vs. /usr/share/doc.  Should be enough to change
/usr/lib/rpm/macros.  But most of the rpm docs are not written by
ourselves but come from other sources and these docs say that
supplementary program documentation can be found in /usr/doc and not in
/usr/share/doc.

Besides, what is FHS-compliancy good for today?  In particular, what is it
really good for for a Sparemint based system?  In theory it is fine to be
able to share for example /usr/share completely among different
architectures or operating systems.  But is there any package manager that
is able to handle that already?  How do I tell a Debian system that files
in /usr/share are shared with a Sparemint system and are likely to get
overwritten or deleted by Sparemint's rpm?

FHS-compliancy is one of Sparemint's goals, sure, but I must admit that
this has very low priority for me.  There are enough real bugs to fix.

Ciao

Guido
-- 
http://stud.uni-sb.de/~gufl0000/
mailto:gufl0000@stud.uni-sb.de