On Wed, 16 Jan 2002, Eray Ozkural (exa) wrote: > It seems that your reasoning that "/opt is reserved for things like Loki > games" is incorrect. See my mail titled "Interpeting FHS". >
[...] > > That is a serious misunderstanding of "add-on". By add-on here it means > application software that is not essential for system functionality, such as > KDE. Saying that "distribution provided" software is not "add on application > software" is gross misunderstanding of the terms involved. Yes I saw it but you are still missing the point. English is not the most precise of languages but the meaning of add-on should be fairly clear. It is something extra beyond what is provided in the base distribution. So how would you define that for Debian? contrib and non-free which are not officially part of Debian? Any package of priority optional or extra? As you can see none of those packages are placed in /opt. The use of /opt goes back to the bad old days of commercial UNIX when vendors would try and soak you for every penny you had. (I believe with SCO even TCP/IP was an add-on at one point!) You would have a base OS and other extra packages you could purchase. Also third-party vendors would sell their own packages. Plus there was free software. All of those things were usually placed in /opt to signify they were not part of the base OS. For instance on a Solaris 8 system I have here there are only three things under /opt. /opt/gnome-1.4 is GNOME, not a Sun product. /opt/sfw comes from a CD of freeware they put out which again is not a Sun product and /opt/SUNWebnfs is WebNFS which is a Sun product but not part of basic Solaris. Now how do you map this concept of addons to Debian? All our packages, even the "extra" and "non-free" ones are first-class citizens. We don't sell enhancements or upgrades. Conceivably in the days of the licensing wars you could have considered KDE an "add-on" to Debian but not now. > > On the contrary, FHS says distributions can install software in /opt, except > certain subdirs reserved for the system administrator. > Does SuSe consider KDE3 to be a "preview" release or unsupported or sometheing you pay extra for? Then it would be legitimate to put it into /opt. If they are just too lazy to properly integrate it into their system then this is not something we should be emulating. > Before you give an answer to this, please read the mail I mentioned, and > section 3.8 in complete. > Also bear in mind the purpose of the FHS is not just to set policy but codify existing practice. Somethings may be allowed which are not necessarily recommended to do. -- Jaldhar H. Vyas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> It's a girl! See the pictures - http://www.braincells.com/shailaja/
