Filesystem Hierarchy Standard patch

[James Ralston]

I apologize for not getting back to this sooner; I've been sidetracked
by dealing with our news server at work.

On Mon, 9 Apr 2001, Katsuhiro Kondou wrote:
> Thanks for patch, and your later one will hopefully be posted to
> inn-patches.  And could you update doc/pod/install rather than
> INSTALL?

Oops; I didn't realize that INSTALL was a generated file.  I'll update
doc/pod/install, of course.

On Wed, 11 Apr 2001, Marco d'Itri wrote:
> I see no reason for people installing the program without a
> packaging system to use FHS paths.

Nor do I; this is why --enable-fhs-dirs has to be manually supplied.
People who just want to build, install, and run INN all on the same
machine aren't going to care about this stuff.

On Mon, 9 Apr 2001, bill davidsen wrote:
> At this point, let me say that I strongly favor the implementation
> name (inn) or the service name (news), since it's less likely to
> conflict on test machines with several flavors of nntp servers
> installed, and on machines running some flavor of wire service type
> news.

Personally, I too think that using the implementation name is a
cleaner approach.  However, after much reflection, I think Marco's
recommendation for backwards compatibility (using the service name) is
the better choice.

If Debian, Red Hat, et. al. have installed INN in /etc/news,
/usr/lib/news, and so forth (and they have), then they're going to be
unwilling to change from using those directories, because doing so
will force their users to make even more changes than an upgrade would
otherwise entail.  If the defaults enabled by --enable-fhs-dirs don't
give them what they want, they're just going to override them.  That
defeats the main purpose of coming up with these changes in the first
place: so that packagers and distributors can *easily* build INN with
FHS compliance.

Since the FHS doesn't speak to this issue, I think the choice between
/etc/inn and /etc/news, /var/lib/inn and /var/lib/news, etc. has to
come down to what is more convenient to the people who will be using
the --enable-fhs-dirs option.  And the answer to that question is
clearly the service name, not the implementation name.

Therefore, I will change instances of <path>/inn to <path>/news in my
FHS patch.

-- 
James Ralston, Information Technology
Software Engineering Institute
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA