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by majewsky 3700 days ago
> Yet some distributions, like for instance Debian or Ubuntu, do not even include them, precluding commercial software vendors from ever delivering software for those operating systems

What? Why should it be impossible for a third-party package to just create /opt? They will probably need to extend the PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH, but /etc/profile.d is very much standardized AFAIK.
2 comments
Annatar 3699 days ago
> Why should it be impossible for a third-party package to just create /opt?

It is not impossible, obviously, but /opt and such should come from the operating system's vendor, and the vendor should be the only one to decide which filesystem permissions to provide: 0755? root:bin or root:sys? root:root? bin:bin? The vendor should decide that, since a vendor is supposed to know their operating system best.

Third parties might not agree, or even decide correctly for that operating system.

This is system engineering and architecture, something which beside operating system vendors, software vendors do not have a clue about in the slightest.

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dingaling 3700 days ago
Indeed Adobe Reader for Linux used to land itself in /opt on Ubuntu.

The power of run-as-su installers...

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Annatar 3699 days ago
The FHS thing in Debian and Ubuntu must be relatively new, I certainly have no recollection of it back then when we looked into delivering unbundled software for it. And we did look for it, and we even combed through the Debian packaging specification back then.

Whatever it might be, or has been, if Debian and Ubuntu did get /opt, /etc/opt, and /var/opt and are now one small step closer to being System V compliant (from which FHS stems), I for one am very glad for that.

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