Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) compliancy?

Russ Allbery rra at stanford.edu
Sat Aug 12 00:30:03 UTC 2000


James Ralston <qralston+ml.inn-workers at andrew.cmu.edu> writes:

> I don't see, however, why the fact that a machine is a "dedicated
> service" machine should make the FHS superfluous.  I'd much rather have
> a single, generalized FHS-style approach to the administration of [n]
> machines, than having [n] different service machines, with [n]
> completely different ways of "doing things".

I agree with that, but I rather like being able to log on to a news server
and find the news stuff in /var/news (or /news), log on to an Oracle
database server and find stuff in /oracle, etc.  I find that more
intuitive, particularly if the file layout under that is reasonable.

I *really* like the way qmail lays out its files, and tend to lay out INN
on my news servers in a similar fashion.

>> I'd be careful with statements like this.  Since its already been
>> stated by a few people here that your proposal is NOT where they expect
>> the components of INN, you imply that they are not competent.  A pretty
>> cheeky risk to take, when at least one of those people is one of the
>> core architects of INN itself.

I'm a biased curmudgeon on the subject of the FHS and know it, and I don't
mind a few friendly barbs because of it.  :)

> Besides, that particular subtopic was spawned by Russ' complaint that he
> gets pestered with configuration questions from Red Hat administrators
> who can't figure out where Red Hat put the config files.  Honestly, I
> would doubt the competency of an "experienced" Red Hat administrator who
> neither could intuit the FHS nor knew enough to use "rpm -qc inn" to
> simply enumerate INN's config files.

That's not the problem; the problem is that the INSTALL file tells them to
look in one place and they can't find anything there.  It requires a lot
of constant matching up between names and rpm -qc inn output.  And I don't
want to write two sets of documentation, one for Linux users and one for
everyone else, and always doing the FHS thing isn't an option.  Not only
do most news administrators that I know not want FHS for INN, but I expect
to see commercial Unix vendors adopt it about the same time Micros~1 does.

> However, given that there seems to be very little (if any opposition) to
> the slight restructuring of /usr/local/news that is necessary in order
> to provide an easy way for an installer to choose to install with FHS
> conformity, it seems to be a mostly moot point anyway...

Yup!  I personally am very strongly in the camp of "software installation
should be flexible because the systems onto which it's being installed
often aren't."

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>



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