On Tue, Jan 19, 2010 at 12:52 PM, James Laska <[email protected]> wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> I have been working on packaging autotest and it's dependencies for use
> in Fedora.  During the formal review of autotest-client for inclusion
> into Fedora [1], several concerns were raised around the filesystem
> layout used in the Fedora autotest-client package.  Specifically, how
> all content lives under '/usr/local/autotest'.  Before attempting to
> address this, I wanted to bring the issues to the list for a wider
> discussion.
>
> The first issue regards the placement, and usage, of files and
> directories beneath /usr/local/autotest [2].  For example, in Fedora,
> the following locations are accepted:
>      * python libraries -> typically /usr/lib/pythonX.Y/
>      * binaries/executables -> /usr/{sbin,bin} or /{sbin,bin}
>      * pid files -> /var/run/
>      * log files -> /var/log/
>      * Config .ini files -> /etc/
>      * test results/ -> unsure, possible somewhere under /var
>
> Turns out, this won't be too much trouble to accommodate from a
> packaging perspective.  I don't think it's uncommon to for the
> packaging-layer to rework where content lives on the system.  However, I
> think a potential obstacle might be ...

Not sure what the issue is here - can you clarify. Generally we don't touch
anything outside of autotest dir, so we shouldn't violate anything.

> The second issue concerns removing any hard-coded references to the
> directory '/usr/local/autotest'.  In order to accomplish the shuffling
> of files in accordance with packaging guidelines, I need to
> remove/adjust any references to '/usr/local/autotest' and be sure that
> autotest can function with it's files in standard system locations
> (e.g. /usr/sbin/, /usr/lib/pythonX.Y, /etc/ ...).

That's going to be challenging, it's designed to operate completely as
one installable package under one directory. It certainly should *not*
be hardcoded to /usr/local/autotest, it should work from anywhere
you put that dir, but it does expect everything it a normalized
structure under one directory.

> Some questions to initiate discussion ...
>
>     1. Before I proceed, has this topic come up before?  Has anyone
>        looked into what it would take to remove any hard-coded
>        '/usr/local/autotest' references?
>     2. There are several global_config.ini configured directories
>        already, should I persue this same mechanism to further
>        accommodate autotest content (bins, libs, cfgs, logs etc...)
>        living in system-wide locations?

There can feasibly be several different copies of autotest, with different
versions and configs running simultaneously.

>     3. Other solutions not considered?
>     4. Would there be any interest in reviewing any proposed patches
>        for inclusion into autotest?

It needs to continue to work in the way it does now, but if you can
make it work with alternate locations as well without breaking that,
I guess we can look at patches to do that. One big concern is making
sure that this doesn't get broken in the future, as nobody else will be
using this setup.

If possible, I'd strongly encourage you to keep it all under one directory
as a package, maintenance will be a lot easier
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