The question is, "who owns /usr/src, Debian or the local sysadmin?"
A recent run-in with the latest pre-release libc6 packages made me
realize that I hadn't fully considered the role of /usr/src on a
Debian system.
In general, I had always considered Debian as "owning" everything
outside /usr/local, /usr/src, and /home. By "owning" I mean that I if
I did anything fancy in the regions that belong to Debian, I should
expect that work might get clobbered later by new Debian packages, or
updates to existing packages.
Unfortunately, kernel-headers, which I had to install for the first
time because of a dependency from the upcoming libc6-dev package,
clobbered my existing *local* kernel source tree headers by writing to
/usr/src/linux which was already a link I had created to
/usr/src/linux-2.1.73. kernel-headers is not the only package
claiming space in /usr/src that might conflict with current practices;
pcmcia-source does as well.
I really only see two possible choices.
1) Flatly state /usr/src/ is owned by Debian. I.e. it is no safer to
put anything there than in /bin. If you want to put something in
/usr/src/ (because you're building kernels with kernel-package or
whatever), you should use /usr/local/src/ instead. This policy, if
adopted, will have to be *heavily* advertised.
2) Try to accomodate user files in /usr/src. This would cause the
least conflict with all the existing kernel/PCMCIA HOWTO's, etc about
where things you unpack should go, but having user files in /usr/src
would probably make it nearly impossible to write "safe"
{pre,post}{inst,rm} scripts for the relevant packages. (Note that the
"bug" that got me was in the kernel-header's postinst where it assumes
that if /usr/src/linux is a link, then it is safe to unpack there.)
I'm not sure what the right answer is, but I think we need to consider
the problem before the new libc6-dev gets released from the
experimental stages, and we certainly need a long-term policy.
--
Rob Browning <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
PGP fingerprint = E8 0E 0D 04 F5 21 A0 94 53 2B 97 F5 D6 4E 39 30
--
TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to
[EMAIL PROTECTED] .
Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .
