Hi folks.
I've been looking at how well Fedora is compliant with the latest LSB and FHS specifications lately.
What about /opt? From the FHS 2.3 document http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#PURPOSE14 , it's seems that all of Fedora's optional packages need to install into /opt/<packagename>.
That's actually the Solaris way as well as, according to the "Rationale" part of this section, "a well establish practice in the UNIX community."
I used to make a living packaging things for Solaris, and Sun's packaging standard clearly states that all add-on software goes to /opt.
I've always hated it. Largely because have /opt/gnome/ , /opt/apache , /opt/kde , etc starts to generate PATH variables that are horrible. However, the nice thing about that is it avoids this sort of thing:
[abennett@burton abennett]$ cd /usr/bin [abennett@burton bin]$ ls | wc -l 2404
2,404 files are in /usr/bin on my FC2 system!
Anyhow, if we are all taking about /svr, we should be talking about /opt and the rest of the FHS. I've never seen any RedHat product pay attention to /opt. Let's decide about both things -- there's little point in disrupting 90% of our users to achieve 50% FHS compliance.
- Aaron
-- Aaron Bennett UNIX Administrator Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering
