On Fri, 28 Nov 1997, Hamish Moffatt wrote: > At the risk of starting another flamewar, providing a KDE > package that installs in /opt is an obvious violation of debian > policy, which I assume is why Andreas does his own. Although > Andreas encourages us not to get the KDE people off-side, > sometimes it wouldn't hurt if the KDE people would try > not to piss us off either.
Note that they are providing .deb packages ON THEIR SITE which install into /opt. Since they're not actually in Debian, they CAN'T be violating a policy that doesn't bind them. Anyone is free to make .deb's that install anywhere, although we encourage them to become maintainers and place everything according to the FHS. It's just that this is the first instance of a package that lots of people are going to want to install. I don't see any reason to deliberatly make it difficult for people to install their packages or ours depending on their preferances, nor any reason to not take a few simple precautions so people don't accidentally mess up their system.
