Bug 271982 – sys-apps/baselayout lacks /srv and /var/lib/misc directories

• Product: Gentoo Linux
• Status: RESOLVED FIXED

[Description Davide Pesavento (RETIRED) 2009-05-31 13:42:39 UTC]

The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS, see URL) requires /srv and /var/lib/misc directories to be present on a FHS-compliant distribution.

[ http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#SRVDATAFORSERVICESPROVIDEDBYSYSTEM ]
"The methodology used to name subdirectories of /srv is unspecified as there is currently no consensus on how this should be done. [...] Therefore, no program should rely on a specific subdirectory structure of /srv existing or data necessarily being stored in /srv. However /srv should always exist on FHS compliant systems and should be used as the default location for such data."

[ http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#VARLIBVARIABLESTATEINFORMATION ]
"There is one required subdirectory, /var/lib/misc, which is intended for state files that don't need a subdirectory; the other subdirectories should only be present if the application in question is included in the distribution."

[Comment 1 Thorsten Vollmer 2009-06-04 20:49:32 UTC]

Adding the /srv directory was suggested before, but it was never widely implemented. I guess that bug 187553, comment 1 still holds true. See also bug 78934.

[Comment 2 Lars Wendler (Polynomial-C) (RETIRED) 2009-06-06 16:25:47 UTC]

There still isn't much interest in making Gentoo more FHS compliant I'm afraid...

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 78934 ***

[Comment 3 Davide Pesavento (RETIRED) 2009-06-07 09:30:57 UTC]

I can understand nobody wants to support FHS-compliant locations (like /srv) in applications, but at least baselayout should create those dirs (/srv and /var/lib/misc). It shouldn't be so hard using dodir or keepdir or something similar, right?
There are applications which rely upon the presence of /var/lib/misc (e.g. policykit), so IMHO it would be better to create at least that one in baselayout ebuild.

[Comment 4 Lars Wendler (Polynomial-C) (RETIRED) 2009-06-08 15:15:33 UTC]

Let's see what our baselayout maintainers think about this.

[Comment 5 Doug Goldstein (RETIRED) 2009-06-08 19:22:35 UTC]

There's a GLEP wrt to /srv and I think people are waiting for it to be implemented. 

http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/glep/glep-0020.html

[Comment 6 SpanKY 2009-06-08 19:26:13 UTC]

nothing needs /srv/ and we arent about to force an empty directory on everyone for no reason

as for /var/lib/misc/, we could create it, but that would be done in the bootmisc init.d script, not the ebuild.  anything that goes in /var/lib/ has to recover at runtime from a `rm -rf /var/lib/*` and a reboot.

as for the FHS itself, it has always been a *guideline*.  we do not require strict conformance to it.  yes, bug 187553, comment 1 still holds true.

[Comment 7 SpanKY 2009-06-08 19:26:52 UTC]

Roy: care to add /var/lib/misc to the bootmisc script (alongside /var/log and such) ?

[Comment 8 Roy Marples 2009-06-08 21:27:20 UTC]

Fixed here

http://roy.marples.name/projects/openrc/changeset/fc6cdefedb0aa507bba3820b4853451baeba5bbb

[Comment 9 SpanKY 2009-06-09 06:40:48 UTC]

thanks