On Mon, May 05, 2014 at 09:45:38PM +0200, Kay Sievers wrote:
> > And calling /usr/libexec "Fedora-only" is of course kind of
> > funny.
> "libexec" is Fedora-only, no other major distro used it, not even LSB
> allowed it.
Well, Red Hat Linux, before Fedora. And I believe we got it from BSD (it
seems to have made its way to Mac OS X as well); it's in the GNU coding
standards, of course... I don't know which was actually first.
But the part that's funny is that there's _several other major distros_
right around the corner that also use it. Now, since they're our downstream,
they probably would follow suit if we decided to do something different, but
that doesn't mean they don't exist.
> It makes no sense to ever have that, and the rest of the world
> realized that long ago.
It makes _some_ sense -- the rationale for it is in _your_ slides just
linked a few posts back -- daemons and other programs meant to be run by
other programs rather than by users. That's exactly the point. I think that
putting each program into its own subdirectory is probably a better way to
solve the same problem in theory, but in practice, libexec does the job
fine.
As I understand it, the /usr/libexec solution was preferred primarily
because it kept /usr/lib just for libraries -- the aesthetic argument,
ironically. We certainly don't follow _that_, so if we're going for
prettiness, going to /usr/lib/[application] makes sense. But it's also a lot
of churn, and it addresses the problem it's aimed at, so.... the case needs
to be stronger than "it doesn't make sense to me".
--
Matthew Miller -- Fedora Project -- <mat...@fedoraproject.org>
"Tepid change for the somewhat better!"
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