[desktop-discuss] Re: [osol-discuss] base directories, gnome versus cde

[Alan Coopersmith]

Alex wrote:
> Back in the day when GNOME 2.0 from Sun shipped on a beta CD, I recall that executables and libraries were installed in /usr/gnome. This was consistent with /usr/dt and other, more archaic windowing systems such as /usr/openwin. Though when GNOME was released and later bundled with Solaris it became based directly under /usr.
> 
> Sun seems to be particular about other directories which to some extent are depended upon by GNOME, such as /usr/sfw. It was more convenient to have a /usr/gnome than the all-inclusive /usr install where it is now difficult to determine whether an application is CLI or GUI without running it.
> 
> Obviously this will never change, but I am curious what the rationale was to locate GNOME/JDS directly under /usr.

Compatibility with the then under-developement JDS/Linux, in
which GNOME tools would be under /usr/bin in compliance with
the Linux Standard Base Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, which
says that splitting up /usr into subdirectories as we've done
on Solaris is verboten on LSB-compliant systems.

-- 
	-Alan Coopersmith-           alan.coopersmith at sun.com
	 Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering