Hi, Ben: On Saturday 28 November 2009 08:59:13 Ben Finney wrote: > "Jesús M. Navarro" <jesus.nava...@undominio.net> writes: > > Not personal but sysadmin related. When I want to find information > > about a given package I go to /usr/share/doc/<pkg> so I find > > reasonable that the local sysadmin would add notes about the package > > right there if needed. > > No, I don't think that's reasonable. The ‘/usr’ hierarchy (with the > important exception of ‘/usr/local’) should be considered entirely the > province of the package management system; any files there can appear or > disappear as dictated by the packages. > > The sysadmin's site-local files should be going under ‘/usr/local’, > which *is* out of bounds for the package manager.
Strongly questionable: notes about package emacs, installed via package manager might go under /usr/share/doc/emacs, why not. > > Less surprise path. > > That's the benefit of following standards like the FHS: there are places > like ‘/usr’ that can be managed entirely by the package manager. Anyone > surprised by that isn't following established convention. Quite a strong asumption given that FSH doesn't say a word *at all* about package managers. And what it says about /usr is: "/usr is the second major section of the filesystem. /usr is shareable, read-only data. That means that /usr should be shareable between various FHS-compliant hosts and must not be written to. Any information that is host-specific or varies with time is stored elsewhere." regarding /usr/share it says: "The /usr/share hierarchy is for all read-only architecture independent data files." So: a) Nothing is said about /usr being "package manager's-only realm". b) Nothing prevents the administrator to peruse /usr/share/doc/ from including architecture-independent data regarding whatever is installed, specially if its about something root-based (in contrast to local-based). c) deleting whole directories disregarding their contents is not what Debian usually does. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-mentors-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org