Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-packaging (60 mails)

[Gary Ekker <gekker@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 2007-01-03 at 18:26 +0100, Stanislav Brabec wrote:
> Andreas Hanke wrote:
> > Richard Bos schrieb:
> > > is it possible to explain, why this is done?  What is the advantage of /usr or 
> > > the disadvantage of /opt?
> > 
> > The /opt/gnome <-> /usr separation simply doesn't work. It worked
> > reasonably in the past when GNOME was sort of self-contained, but today
> > GNOME packages install a lot of files (mono libraries, python modules,
> > dbus services, message catalogs...) that *must* live in /usr.
> > 
> > This means that the packages and spec files became uglier and worse all
> > the time because packagers had to move parts of the stuff back from
> > /opt/gnome to /usr. Of course it's very easy to forget that, resulting
> > in completely broken packages. There were tons of such bugs in the
> > openSUSE 10.2 preparation period and there are still some of those
> > floating around, affecting both SUSE and especially 3rd party packages
> > because some people are not always aware of where stuff has to go.
> > 
> > (That's my main point against /opt/gnome, there are others as well)
> 
> That's the exact technical explanation. Look at Bugzilla and package
> changelogs for keyword "prefix clash" or look at extra "mv" commands in
> spec files to get a proof.
> 
> Additionally installation of distribution packages to /opt:
> - Breaks LSB rules.
> - Forces third parties to create many distribution specific RPM
>   packages.
> 

Fixing these issues makes it much easier to have cross-distro specfiles,
which is a huge win in my opinion. It also allows us to take advantage
of some of the rpm macros that we can't use currently.

-Gary

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