Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) compliancy?

[Russell Vincent]

Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> writes:
> James Ralston <qralston+ml.inn-workers at andrew.cmu.edu> writes:
> > Over the past decade, I have worked extensively on different unix
> > systems, including all mixes of FHS and non-FHS systems, and systems
> > that do and do not use package management.  (Of course, the FHS didn't
> > exist back in the early 90's, but we had the same issue with vendor
> > versus third-party software).  Today, I find FHS, package-managed
> > systems the easiest to work with.
> 
> I appreciate that, and I'd like to make it possible for INN to be easy for
> you to use, but your opinion is not unanimous among those of us who have
> worked extensively on different Unix systems for the past decade.

As another person who has worked with Unix (and news servers) for over
a decade, I can fully agree with Russ. I have taken over the admin of
many news servers with INN splattered around the system in ways similar
to FHS and everytime I tear my hair out and rebuild the system from
scratch, installing INN into /news.

There is a lot to be said for going into ~/news and doing 'ls bin'
to find that INN utility you wanted at glance, without having to sift
through hundreds of little utilities that have nothing to do with news.
INN is a beast that takes over a machine in any medium to large
setup.

I completly agree that utilities like gzip, tar, etc, belong in a
nicely built standard directory structure like you describe, but INN
isn't a utility; it is a subsystem and deserves its own location.

I am currently designing and dealing with extremely large, scalable
and distributed systems (not just news) and each machine is a
effectively a module in the large network of machines. Installing
all the files for an application into a single directory tree
makes administration of these machines a _lot_ easier. The app
gets its own disk partition, completely distinct from the OS.
I can then completely trash, upgrade or re-install the OS and the app
is not touched. I re-mount the app partition and run the startup
script and off it goes as if nothing happened.

I agree that INN could do with an option to enable FHS at configure
time for those small INN installations, but it isn't going to happen
unless someone who works with that type of directory layout comes
up with the patches to make it an option. You can argue your point
to death, but it won't happen without someone who wants it, doing
the work and it seems most (all?) of the current developers don't
need it.

 -Russell