Unnamed sources report that Erik Troan said: > On Thu, 21 Jan 1999, Florian La Roche wrote: > > > This standardization project should be documenting the current state > > and the current movement. This will bring the Linux distributions
Hmm, is that the point of a standardization project, to document the current state of the art? I would hope that such an undertaking would consider the current state of the art but also point out where "common practice" is making a mistake. With respect to the case in point, /var/mail seems to be the standard everywhere but Linux, which generally uses /var/spool/mail. If Linux wants to play nice with the other *NIXes, we should mandate /var/mail, deprecate /var/spool/mail, indicate a "to be withdrawn" date of X for /var/spool/mail, and suggest a link from /var/mail to /var/spool/mail to kick-start the transition. This gives vendors time to rebuild all of the affected applications, and puts users and developers on notice that the change will be happening. > I think this is a strong point. The distributions have all agreed on > this, FSSTND 1.2 recommended it, nobody has implemented FHS 2.0, and > somehow we want to try and get all of the distributions to change for > no compelling reason. If FHS 2.0 is out there and no one is implementing it, that's a vendor problem. I've personally taken small steps to bring my system into FHS 2 compliance, but it would be a lot easier if the distribution vendors did it. > Funny, people complain that the distributions don't get along and seem > to disregard our input when we do. Noted. -- Kurt Wall Informix on Linux FAQ - http://www.xmission.com/~kwall/iolfaq.html Spanish Translation - http://www.xmission.com/~kwall/iolfaqsp.html
