On Sat, Feb 19, 2000 at 02:47:34PM +1100, Hamish Moffatt wrote: > And why not? Try reading the FHS -- there's rationale in there for > everything. It all makes perfect sense to me -- /usr/local/var is a load > of crap, if you want to label something. Make /usr/local/var a symlink then to /var.
_local_ means it is managed by the local user. > The FHS's idea is that /usr is static and can be mounted read-only. > Therefore /usr/local/var and /usr/local/etc are out of place. Of course > our users can make them if they want, because /usr/local is entirely up > to the local admin. But you guys are shipping it out of the box ... You can mount /usr read-only on a FreeBSD box, and _never_ change it. Just have /usr/local be read-write. > > There are only a handful of the 3,071 ports/packages that out and out > > conflict with another. And it is documented in the readme.. > > Then you probably don't have anywhere near the number of packages we do, > because we have a lot of stuff that conflicts. For example, I maintain > a package of the xpdf GPL PDF viewer; we have a decryption-enabled version > stored on free-world servers, and the normal version stored on police-state > servers (ie the USA). These conflict because they both provide /usr/bin/xpdf, > which makes perfect sense. We've got about 3,110 ports now. How many do you have? But the number of ports that truly conflict are under well under 100, if I had to guess. (Not counting ports for speakers of different languages) > > Less than ideal, yes, but it is being addressed in designing the 2nd-gen > > package system. Debian can feel free to step in and relicense code/donate > > time to help make our package system better. Everyone would be happier :) > > You're welcome to our code, it's under the GPL. There isn't a big push to make key components of the OS under the GPL, sorry. -Dan
