Marc Haber <mh+debian-packa...@zugschlus.de> writes:
> On Tue, Jul 03, 2012 at 10:52:26AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> I think it's perfectly acceptable to have an admin drop data into a
>> /var/lib directory for non-default configurations of packages.
> Is this documented in policy?
> Greetings
> Marc, really reluctant to spend days to change a package in a way that
> might not be policy compliant and might cause the next RC bug to be
> slapped upon me
Sure, I understand. I can say that it's definitely better than /home in
the respect that it's rather unlikely to cause the package to break on
some common system configurations.
Policy itself of course doesn't say anything at all about any of the
things that we're talking about except by reference to the FHS. This all
comes from the FHS, which we only occasionally elaborate on, and which is
quite a bit terser than Policy in most of its requirements. The relevant
one here is:
Users must never need to modify files in /var/lib to configure a
package's operation.
which can be read a few different ways, depending on how generous one
wants to be.
I think sticking the home directory in /var and documenting how to fiddle
with it would put you firmly enough in the mainstream of Debian packages
that I would feel no qualms about downgrading any bugs anyone filed about
it to important at most, even if it's not exactly perfect from an FHS
perspective. Ideal would probably be to wrap some sort of program around
the ssh setup so that the *user* is no longer fiddling with things in
/var/lib, but rather telling a program their configuration desires and
letting the program adapt to them. However, I certainly understand not
wanting to do that work for an optional feature of the package.
If putting the system user home directory in /home were just an FHS
violation, I wouldn't be in favor of filing RC bugs for it. The problem
is that, depending on how /home is managed, it can bring installation of
the package to a grinding halt and make it very difficult to use in some
environments. It's the *practical* difficulties underlying the FHS
requirement that I think raise the priority to release-critical. And
those don't apply to /var/lib, even if asking the user to poke around in
those directories is not the intent of the FHS.
I agree with you that we don't have a good, general, comfortable solution
to the specific problem that you're running into.
--
Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-policy-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Archive: http://lists.debian.org/873958oes6....@windlord.stanford.edu
