On Wed, 31 Dec 2008 12:00:35 +0100 Fabio Rossi <ross...@inwind.it> wrote:
> On Wednesday 31 December 2008, Marius Mauch wrote: > > > The same could be said about /var/lib/init.d, /var/lib/dhcp, > > /var/lib/iptables or several other packages that aren't hosted by > > Gentoo. In the other direction, if the packages are eventually used > > on other distributions/systems, should they then use another path? > > The path could be configured of course but, again, I see a few > chances of having this tools outside gentoo, the proposal is based > also on this idea. > > > Mind that this only addresses the FHS part of my mail, you haven't > > really answered my question: What's the benefit of changing things? > > Change for the sake of change is rarely a good idea (unless you > > work in PR/marketing ;) > > The main benefit is a cleaner filesystem, I don't know your opinion > but I hate to see sparse files around the tree and waste time in > discovering their source :-) Moreover IMHO it gives me the impression > of a better design. Ok, so in other word aesthetics. > > > In the opposite direction, in according to your opinion, I don't > > > see a reason to have /var/lib/gentoo/news instead of something > > > like /var/lib/gentoo-news. > > > > Right. But retroactively changing GLEP 42 and all affected packages > > is a bit much just to avoid a generic "gentoo" directory. > > So we can exploit this condition to collect all gentoo related files > inside this dir ;-) Well, the impact is about the same wether you want to change one or the other (btw, what about other admin tools on Gentoo, e.g. paludis/pkgcore, by your definition they'd also have to go into /var/lib/gentoo, right?), and that impact is non-trivial (it's not so much the code changes themselves but the inevitable transition problems). Compared to the IMO very questionable benefit of a "cleaner" filesystem (by hiding files users usually don't see anyway one level deeper in the tree structure) that more or less goes against the FHS, that doesn't sound like a good deal to me. Marius
