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

[From: Graham Cobb]

On Thursday 10 September 2009 13:05:35 Marius Vollmer wrote:
> ext Graham Cobb <g+770 at cobb.uk.net> writes:
> > 2) Nokia sets up the environment (in both the SDK and on the device) to
> > include /opt directories in PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, PKG_CONFIG_PATH and
> > PYTHON_PATH.  In that case, I would encourage Mer to also implement this.
> >
> > 3) Allow use of --prefix=/opt.  Any package that wants to use that is
> > fine. In particular, allow installation into /opt/bin, /opt/lib, etc (not
> > just into /opt/<package>).  Note that this is not FHS compliant (FHS
> > would require --prefix=/opt/package).
>
> I think this is a essentialy useless exersize.  Replace /opt with /usr
> in your text above, and you'll see that this has already been done.  

Exactly!  My proposal was to make /opt into another /usr.

> I don't see a need to add a third prefix into the picture.

Only that we are being told we have no choice!

> Instead, we should move /usr to a different partition if we really want
> to.  I hope we can avoid that by moving all of / to the eMMC, but if
> that is not possible for whatever reason, we should move /usr.

If this is really temporary and can/will be fixed in the first update then I 
agree that putting maemo-optify in debian/rules (and maemo-optify in the 
Build-Depends) is the right answer.  There is no need to do it automatically 
for all packages because it only matters for larger packages and they tend to 
have maintainers who are more able to test and fix any obscure problems it 
causes.  Leave the semi-automatically ported Debian packages and most small 
packages unchanged.

If it isn't going to be fixed until Harmattan (which is presumably some time 
away and may not ever run on current devices such as the N900)  then I think 
it should be less hacky than a bunch of symlinks.  That is why I wanted to 
see /opt promoted to an equivalent of /usr.

Graham