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 --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+help@opensuse.org