packaging-committee

#1475 Refer to "Linux File System Hierarchy" instead of the FHS
Opened by zbyszek. Modified
zbyszek/packaging-committee use-file-hierarchy  into  master

Download 1475.patch

The FHS is severly outdated. Even the "current" version 3.0 is 10
years old at this point (published June 3, 2015), and hasn't even
followed the evolution of Linux systems that happened before 2015.
In particular, at that time, the usr-merge had already happened in Fedora,
with the relevant discussions happening very publicly in the preceding years.
Obviously, the FHS also couldn't follow later changes like the sbin-merge,
or increasing use of /run. There are some open tickets discussing additions
to the FHS, but they are stalled and it seems that there is little suppport
among the maintainers. At this point, the FHS is mostly of historical interest.

Link to file-hierarchy.7 that is provided by the systemd project. It
describes modern Linux systems as they are, so it's both much more
accurate and relevant, but also a much shorter document. That page
internally links to FHS 3.0 and XDG docs, so the interested reader can
read the background docs if they want to. Since the new page actually
describes what we are doing anyway, this doesn't introduce any new rules,
only just drops some baggage that we were ignoring anyway.

Prompted by fedora-devel thread:
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org/message/54GTFIECDKTIBATUVG3JQ4ZEDFBUMNLE/

There are a few more references to FHS in the guidelines

Not sure how much we want to link to a systemd man page.

Maybe worth borrowing/repeating it in our docs, along with notes saying FHS is dead.

Not sure how much we want to link to a systemd man page.

Maybe worth borrowing/repeating it in our docs, along with notes saying FHS is dead.

We have now moved it to https://uapi-group.org/specifications/specs/linux_file_system_hierarchy/ which is neutral grounds
Edited by bluca

rebased onto 24b018899f51fbbd10111afa5e6097ea39f6d3b2

I updated the patch here to link to the new location.

Maybe worth borrowing/repeating it in our docs, along with notes saying FHS is dead.

Apparently not entirely, FHS 4.0 might come out at some point. But I still think it makes sense to link to the new page. It just is a lot of text that is not at all specific to Fedora. By linking to the external docs we make it more likely that other distributions will follow the same rules. And we don't need to duplicate the work.

We made some updates and clarifications to the LFSH document, adding descriptions of /opt, /usr/include, and /usr/libexec. Please consider merging this PR.

Unfortunately, I would oppose merging this change since UAPI LFH is fundamentally opposed to what most distributions do and what existing stakeholders even want.

I think any decision on whether the distribution follows any specific version of the FHS or the LFH or something else is quite fundamental and should be made by FESCo or higher up than that. If a decision is made to change what the distribution follows, then we can update the packaging guidelines.

I have no objection to, or opinion on, such a change; I just don't think it is this committee's place to decide.

Unfortunately, I would oppose merging this change since UAPI LFH is fundamentally opposed to what most distributions do and what existing stakeholders even want.

Hmm, that is some strong words. Do you have any quotes or facts or anything else to substantiate this claim?

→ https://pagure.io/fesco/issue/3490

rebased onto 9f5fc87ef45921093661452bf42a47fa11993ffa

rebased onto 43294c77c61c6f2a64d0a0b404275943f6151f11

Rebased. I dropped the commit for /nix (since that was already merged separately), and added a new one for /boot/efi.
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