I strongly disagree with the move of mailman from /var/mailman to /home/mailman. (bug 14974) The move of mailman to /home is in violation of the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, and clutters up my /home structure. The FHS specifically states that /home is for user home directories, and while 'mailman' is technically a 'user', there is no individual associated with that account. I generally assume that /home is a "users-only" place...I don't like to see system/application files cluttering it up. A better place to put it would be under either /usr, or /opt (for optional 3rd-party packages). /opt is preferable, because the FHS stipulates that systems be able to mount /usr read-only. A better idea still would be to split up the data and code parts of the program, so archives and associated list data get stored in /var, while everything else resides in /usr (or /opt). I don't know how difficult this would be to do...the last time I installed mailman, it was rather difficult, if not impossible. But that might have changed, as it's been a while since I installed it by hand. FHS issues notwithstanding, it also breaks the package for those of us who had it working happily in /var. I had to move Mailman back to its original location, and symlink /home/mailman.
I think that a little bash to check to see if it's already installed to /var and tweak the configuration/installation accordingly would be the best approach to avoid breaking existing installs. Theoretically, /opt and /usr should both be mountable read-only. That leaves us with /home and /var. Most people I've talked to think that /var is too confusing for most packages. If this was tweakable in the ebuild via an environment variable, would you be okay with that solution (when combined with a fix to keep it from breaking existing installs)?
Hmmm. You have a good point about /opt needing to be able to be mounted read-only. I can also understand why /var is too confusing for many people. Perhaps something like /var/opt or /var/local? Although I suppose that has the potential to be even more confusing... If only Mailman actually followed the standard. :) The environment variable would be fine with me, assuming we can't come up with a better place to put it on our own. Thanks!
I have commited 2.1.2 moving Mailman to /usr/local/mailman as the default install of mailman would do.
And here I come. <rant mode on> I dislike both /home and /usr/local. I've run mailman for long time (compiled from source when I was a deadrat user :-/) and I've always installed it in /var/mailman. If we will go switching every package's information repository, then, we have cyrus-imap which stores e-mails under /var/spool/imap/user/, bind: /var/bind/ and apache /home/httpd, just to name the ones I use. I really don't want to move my data from here to there, so please, say where we will store information, and stick to it. <rant mode off> Of course, the real fix would be to store binaries in /usr, and data in /var, as someone else told before. But I don't know how hard could be: I'll take a look tomorrow. BTW, please, excuse my English. It's late, and I speak spanish. Best regards, Norberto
As far as I am concerned the 'real' fix is to follow what mailman (An official GNU application) does. Mailman 2.1.2 installs itself into /usr/local/mailman by default. To me, if the people creating the package put it in /usr/local/ it doesnt seem like it violates FHS, or anything else, because as far as I can remember GNU is pretty picky about that sort of thing. Now, here is MY issue: One person doesnt want it in /var/ and says the mailman default is /home. Another person says /home is a violation of FHS and wants it back in /var or anywhere else. I take my time to find out where mailman installs itself by default, discover it is /usr/local/ and change it accordingly. Now you want it back in /var, or split /usr and /var. I cant speak for your other package's, but this one is stored in the default location for this package, so we didnt 'change' anything. In fact, up until a recent version, mailman was supposed to go in /home/mailman and we were changing it to use /var/mailman. (Which you seem fine with) Unless you can give me very good reason, mailman is going to stay where the creators of the application have it located, /usr/local.
I understand your issues, and BTW, looking at the ebuild, I see: INSTALLDIR="/usr/local/mailman" so I guess I can customize it to suit my needs. Regards, Norberto
I hate to have to disagree with you Todd, but I think you are a little confused about this issue: Nearly all "official GNU applications" default to being installed under "/usr/local", because the FHS says they should. The FHS also says that all files under /usr/local must be safe from being overwritten when the system is upgraded, http://www.pathname.com/fhs/2.2/fhs-4.9.html What this means is that any tarball you download should default to installing into "/usr/local" because it assumes it is being installed "by hand" more or less. Any time that same package is installed by a distribution's package manager (portage in our case) it should not be installed in /usr/local A similar issue was discussed on gentoo-dev last year, and /var was chosen as the location to install packages of this nature so that /home could be reserved for real users, and /usr could be mounted read-only. There are links to some of those discussions at the bottom of Glep #11. I haven't been keeping up on this stuff, but from Glep #20 it looks as if this might be changing in the future. In any event, there's a reason that even the ebuild "econf" function does, as a standard part of it's operation, change an applications default install dir to /usr instead of /usr/local. That all being said, the INSTALLDIR variable is not a good solution. To get it to install where I want it, I have to edit an ebuild and rebuild its digest, and I'll have to remove mailman from my world definitions to prevent the next version from making a new copy in /usr/local, which means I'll have to repeat these steps next time I upgrade. Thanks for your help on this.
Wow. I can't believe this is not fixed 1 year later. The last comment is correct: package management systems should not touch /usr/local. This is reserved for _hand_ installations not involving package management software. The GNU standard covers _hand_ installations, not distro packaged software. So if /opt and /usr can be mounted read-only, how do they ever get software installed in them? Obviously, if you think for a minute, /usr and /opt need not _always_ be mounted read only. Admins _can_ make them writable for the purpose of installing software. And read-only /opt and /usr is really for passive clients, not servers where mailman would be installed. Please do the sensible thing and put this back in /var or /opt or any reasonable place other than /usr/local or /home.
