On 6/21/19 7:35 AM, Thorsten Kukuk wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 21, Frans de Boer wrote:
> 
>> On 21-06-19 15:19, Mats Wichmann wrote:
> 
>>> Linux Foundation still hosts the infrastructure, and the spec sources
>>> are on github (https://github.com/LinuxStandardBase/fhs-spec).  There
>>> are people who will work on moving it forward - if there's interest and
>>> participation.  As you have seen from the level of activity, there
>>> hasn't been much interest since FHS 3 was published four years ago.
> 
>> So, the question is "how to raise interest". And if there is none, does this
>> imply that we are stuck with an old specification with no hope of going
>> forward?
> 
> I think there is still interest. If you look at the mail archive and
> bugzilla, there are people who wanted to have changes or clarifications,
> but with the answers they got (choose anything yourself or wait for 
> the next FHS version), I think most people gave up and declared FHS for
> dead.

Mostly those replies reflect a pragmatic approach to reality, basically:

(a) Nobody gives the FHS any particular authority to dictate things,
it's a collection of existing best practices that people agreed were
good to follow.  There are no consequences for not following, and no
test suite (there were some FHS-compliance tests in the LSB test suite,
but of course that's a dead project now). (also see note at end)

(b) there's not really not enough momentum to count on FHS to solve a
problem you're having *now* so don't raise your expectations too high
and make a sensible choice (consider it was about 10 years between 2.3
and 3.0, and it's been four years since then).

> I for example was neither aware about the github project nor that people
> are looking for participation.

Yeah, I see the page that is supposed to reflect the "new" FHS home is
quite out of date (https://wiki.linuxfoundation.org/lsb/fhs) and never
mentions github. Not sure I can edit that any longer, some strange
things happened to that wiki.


I don't want to overstate the situation.  If there are people interested
in building consensus on reflecting more recent developments, I know
there are a few people happy to work on building a new version.  I have
trouble letting go of old projects, so I'm in that list (it's certainly
not sponsored work; indeed I don't have any paid work at the moment).
But as of now there's nobody actively soliciting participation or
anything like that.


Note:  the current FHS has carried forward the idea of being relatively
OS-agnostic.  There are historical artifacts based on UNIX and *BSD
systems.  One thing that's been discussed more than once over the years
is whether there's value to a more current-Linux-centric version, where
maybe some of the historical constraints don't need to be retained?

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