A modest proposal #1: /opt

[Charles Wilson]

Max Bowsher wrote:

> Because of this non-reserved nature of /opt, what about using
> /usr/<packagename> - after all, we already have /usr/autotool, and kerberos
> often goes into /usr/kerberos, doesn't it?

No, no, no, a thousand times no.  It has already been established that 
we (the cygwin-apps readership, collectively) do not want an explosion 
of directory names under / or /usr.  I regret having used /usr/autotool; 
I was young and stupid -- but it's really too late to fix it now.  And 
as for kerberos, I've seen /kerberos, /opt/kerberos, /usr/kerberos, and 
/usr/local/kerberos.  Of those, ONLY /opt/kerberos is FHS sanctioned.

I realize that cygwin cannot precisely follow the FHS in all cases, for 
a variety of reasons.  But why go OUT of our way to invent new and 
different ways to do things when the FHS way *will* work?  Just to be 
different?

> This leaves the contested /opt heirarchy safely untouched.

It's not "contested"!  It's dual-use, exactly as specified by the FHS. 
And an explosion of subdirectories is precisely what /opt is supposed to 
contain, so no problems there.  The only time you'd run into conflicts 
in /opt is if you wanted to compile 'foo' into /opt/foo/ manually, AND 
there was a "foo" package already on the mirror system which you have 
already installed, and which either (a) just so happened to be one of 
the rare instances in which we (cygwin-apps) deemed it necessary to use 
the /opt heirarchy, or (b) the "foo" package was part of the 
unsupported/ AND used /opt instead of /usr/local. [see RFD #2].  IF all 
of that is true (NOT very likely IMO) -- then there's a simple solution: 
use setup to uninstall the foo package, if you really really really want 
to roll your own!

--
Chuck