Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) compliancy?

Russ Allbery rra at stanford.edu
Wed May 9 13:13:11 UTC 2001


James Ralston <qralston+ml.inn-workers at andrew.cmu.edu> writes:
> On 10 Mar 2001, Russ Allbery wrote:

>> Yeah, but we have a wider variety of directories than those macros
>> account for; we have things like docdir as well.  (We also don't
>> correctly use some things like mandir; I'd welcome patches to fix that
>> or I'll get to it at some point.)

> I plan to correct that as well.

I won't bother to try to fix this, then.  :)

>>> The values of the various directories are taken from per-platform
>>> macro files.  Under Red Hat 7.0, they are:

>> I assume that they're converging towards something that we can support
>> and that we don't need to continue to support the older versions?

> Who is the "they" in your sentence?

All of the different Linux distributions.  I was under the impression that
there was a cross-distribution standard for such things that people were
generally moving towards, so that in the long run hopefully the amount of
differentiation between distributions would decrease.

> An example of situation #1 is PATHBIN and PATHAUTH.  Currently, PATHAUTH
> is automatically defined as "$(PATHBIN)/auth".  Under the FHS, PATHAUTH
> should most appropriately be /usr/lib/inn/auth, but the only way to
> achieve that is to set PATHBIN to /usr/lib/inn, which is definitely not
> the most appropriate location.

I'll be quite happy to see all of the subdirectories of PATHBIN go away.
I never liked the idea of having subdirectories of a bin directory; except
for a few very special cases (like Solaris's sparcv7 vs. sparcv9
architecture switch), I think that's a mistake.

> Provided that any new configurable directories inherit the same values
> as they currently have if they aren't explicitly set (either by hand, or
> with the option that enables FHS compliance), and that the creation of
> new configurable directories is kept to the minimum required to enable a
> --with-fhs-compliance option to work properly, do we care if more
> configurable directories are created?

No, that's fine.  I'd prefer to avoid pages and pages of "put this
directory there" options as much as we can and just pick some sane
defaults, but it's more important to get FHS compliance than it is to try
to cut down on configuration options.

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


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