Designing Good Linux Applications

An Anonymous Coward writes: "A guy from IBM's Linux Impact Team in Brazil has written a guest column on Linux and Main describing how applications should integrate with Linux. It's Red Hat-centric, but there is a lot of material about the FHS and LSB that most users probably don't know."

Comments

Re:/usr/local obsolete?

[ggeens]

I understand that this is directly from the FHS.

Not true. This is what the FHS says about /usr/local:

The place for locally installed software and other files. Distributions may not install anything in here. It is reserved solely for the use of the local administrator. This way he can be absolutely certain that no updates or upgrades to his distribution will overwrite any extra software he has installed locally.

/opt is not mentioned as far as I can see. I remember reading that it was deprecated.

/usr/local is not obsolete, and won't be. The only rule is that a package manager (dpkg, rpm,...) should never touch that directory (beyond creating it on a new install).

RPM is the standard, and APT works on it

[Nailer]

Anyone running Red Hat 7.2 or many other RPM based distributions can easily install apt (or a similar tool, like urpmi, tho I prefer apt) to do the same thing.

The advantage there is that RPM is a standard - currently the older RPM (version 3) is included in the Linux Standards Base, but once Maximum RPM is updated for RPM 4, its extremely likely that RPM 4 will become the standard.

If you're using Red Hat I highly recommend installing it.

rpm -Uvh http://enigma.freshrpms.net/pub/apt/apt-0.3.19cnc5 5-fr7.i386.rpm

apt-get check
apt-get update
apt-get install

/opt is in FHS

[Skapare]

/opt is in FHS 2.2 at secton 3.12. It begins:

3.12.1 Purpose

/opt is reserved for the installation of add-on application software packages.

A package to be installed in /opt must locate its static files in a separate /opt/<package> directory tree, where <package> is a name that describes the software package.

Doesn't look very depricated to me. I think the problem is your FHS link isn't really the FHS; it is the SAG (Systems Administrator Guide), which in section 4.1 clearly says it is loosely based on the FHS.

As for /usr/local, I do agree it should be off-limits to the distribution (besides setting it up if not already present). And packages in the package format of the distribution (e.g. RPM for Redhat, Mandrake, SuSE, etc ... DEB for Debian and any like it ... TGZ for Slackware ... and so on) really should stay out of /usr/local. What /usr/local should be is whatever is local policy (FHS doesn't say it this way). Packages that the administrator really wants to be separate from the package management system, stuff compiled from source, stuff locally developed, all is eligible to be in /usr/local. My guess is the author of the article has no experience doing system administration combined with a decision making role where he might have to choose to do something slightly different than what everone else does.