Re: Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) and NetBSD

[Thor Lancelot Simon <tls%panix.com@localhost>]

On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 12:47:41PM -0400, Jeff Licquia wrote:
> On 05/10/2011 11:58 AM, Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:
> 
> If the effort for a general UNIX FHS were seen as useful, we'd be
> happy to relegate the Linux-isms to the Linux annex, and endorse
> BSD-isms in *BSD annexes.  (Or one BSD annex?)

So the task would become identifying the largest possible subset of
the tree (subgraph of the filesystem graph?) that is the same between
a wide variety of Unix systems (or at least 4.4BSD and Linux?) and
reducing the main body of the standard to specify that, then
moving/adding appendices for existing variations.

So an implementation would conform to FHS version X and FHS version X
appendix Y.  That might work.

Unfortunately, I think the commonalities will not be as great as one
might naively think.  Just comparing NetBSD and FreeBSD, I see a lot
of differences scattershot all over the tree -- /usr/pkg vs /usr/local
(one could argue this is because the way FreeBSD 'ports' originally
used /usr/local was not in conformance with the existing hier(7) -- which
is what we thought at the time we renamed it IIRC), the organization
of the startup and periodic scripts in /etc, quite a bit of other stuff.
The differences to Linux or Solaris of course are comparatively huge.

Fortunately directories not used by executables, for example source
directories (/usr/src, /usr/pkgsrc, /usr/ports) can probably be well
outside the scope.

This all might be a worthwhile effort but just figuring out if it really
is would take a not insubstantial amount of work.  I don't mean to
discourage anyone from figuring out, but -- still, don't underestimate
the size of even that task.

An emphasis in NetBSD has been on making it possible to relocate all
optional software as seamlessly as possible.  That is not strictly
speaking a substitute for this kind of standard but, widely adopted,
it could at least reduce the scope of what needs to be standardized.

Thor