On Wed, Jul 11, 2018 at 6:11 PM Richard Yao <r...@gentoo.org> wrote: > > Is it a violation of the FHS? /usr is for readonly data and the portage tree > is generally readonly, except when being updated. The same is true of > everything else in /usr. >
It is application metadata. It belongs in /var. No other packages write to /usr when they're doing internal updates. Obviously you need a writable /usr to actually install package changes, but that shouldn't be necessary just to sync the repository. I was asking around and it seems like most distros stick their repositories in /var/lib. I can't imagine that too many would have even considered sticking them in /usr. > I am confused as to how we only now realized it was a FHS violation when it > has been there for ~15 years. I was under the impression that /usr was the > correct place for it. It has certainly been pointed out in the past. Nothing was changed for the same reason that nothing will probably be changed this time - people don't like change and the people who know better just slowly patch around Gentoo's oddities. Somebody was just posting a manifesto about deploying more experimental technologies, and here we can't move a repository out of /usr. And if nothing else, can we at least move /usr/portage/distfiles someplace else? Surely you have to agree that this doesn't belong in usr, or nested in the middle of a repository? -- Rich
