[maemo-developers] Considering /opt and MyDocs in your packages

[From: Marius Vollmer]

"Hassan Mohammed.2 (Nokia-D/Helsinki)" <mohammed.2.hassan at nokia.com>
writes:

> And that indication is already a packaging difference.
> I'd rather do ./configure --prefix=/opt/<package> and that's it.

And then you have to deal with the fallout from that.  If you are ready
to do that, more power to you, but I really would like to keep a very
low profile on using /opt/maemo: there are better ways to give more
space to the rootfs and we should make it easy to stop using /opt/maemo
again.

I really hope this is only temporary.

If you want to use /opt for other reasons, for example because you like
the cleanliness of storing all your files below /opt/<package>, then I
don't want to stop you, of course.

But very few packages do this in practice, and it doesn't look like a
obviously good thing to me either.  Executable programs and libraries
_are_ in a flat namespace, and you can not avoid conflicts by storing
them outside of the usual /bin, /lib etc directories.  For me, it's a
feature that two installed packages can't both contain libfoo.so.0, and
I want the package management tools to tell me about this conflict.