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

[From: Andrew Flegg]

On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 16:12, Marius Vollmer <marius.vollmer at nokia.com> wrote:
> ext Andrew Flegg <andrew at bleb.org> writes:
>>
>> Instead of using a fixed prefix of /opt/maemo/<path>, use
>> /opt/<package>/<trimmed path>.
>
[big snip]

I'm not going to get into a point-by-point rebuttal of these. But
installing stuff in /opt on Maemo by third-parties isn't really going
to happen. We own the space, pretty much everything is going to be
installed from packages, and we already make all manner of assumptions
in a Linux system that there's some unique "UNIX name" for a package.
Why *not* make the one-line change to maemo-optify to make its results
slightly cleaner?

>  - Computing the <trimmed path> from <path> is an extra complication,
>   and we must make sure that no collisions happen.  It's doable of
>   course, but in the light of the arguments above, why bother?

...because /opt is a hack because no-one at Nokia had the foresight to
imagine that users might want to install multiple applications, and
large new frameworks like Qt.

...because /opt is a hack which should be *embarassing*.

...because maemo-optify creating a forest of symlinks is messy,
unelegant and possibly prone to failure (see my earlier question about
Python modules and sub-directories of optified packages).

Mainly, though, because last minute fixes shouldn't throw good design
out of the window.

Cheers,

Andrew

-- 
Andrew Flegg -- mailto:andrew at bleb.org  |  http://www.bleb.org/
Maemo Community Council chair