rules for /usr/bin (was Re: Nethack 3.4.3 [PSARC/2008/172 ...])

[Alan Coopersmith]

Danek Duvall wrote:
> [ Moving this to opensolaris-arc (and bcc'ing psarc-members), which I
> believe is the best external equivalent to psarc-members.  Feel free to
> move it elsewhere if appropriate. ]
> 
> On Sun, Mar 09, 2008 at 08:20:34AM -0700, Octave Orgeron wrote:
> 
>> The idea of having major components (X11, Gnome, Postgres, Mysql, Perl,
>> PHP, etc.) with their own directory structure to support multiple
>> versions makes the most sense.
> 
> There's not much else you can do, short of requiring that only one version
> be on the system at a time.  Which we're doing with gnome.  And I think X11
> is too deeply ingrained at this point in people's consciousness as being
> under /usr/Xsomething that it would be hard to move (though I'll note for
> completeness sake that at least gentoo linux links /usr/X11R6 to /usr).

The LSB/FHS only allows /usr/X11R6 as an exception to the "no subdirs of /usr"
rule, so all the major Linux distros I'm aware of put X11R7 binaries in
/usr/{bin,lib,...}.

I've stuck with /usr/X11 on Solaris to allow for users who wanted their own
version for whatever reason (we're not going to update Solaris 10 forever,
and I've already seen many users wish GNOME was in /usr/gnome so it would
be easier to drop in something more recent than Solaris 10's GNOME 2.6.)

I've also not gotten around to dropping links in /usr/bin, but I'm not aware
of any reason we shouldn't.

We are working to make /usr/openwin be a backwards compatibility artifact
only though.

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