On Wed, Oct 19, 2016 at 08:52:26AM -0500, Jason L Tibbitts III wrote:
But.. if you're suggesting that the regularly-packaged libeoffice be moved out of /usr and into /opt/fedora/apps/libreoffice (or libreoffice-5.1.6.1 or libreoffice-5.1.6.1-2 or some other variation incorporating more of the version-release pair) then... that's a big deal.
Yeah, I'm suggesting considering the big deal. That way, we basically get Flatpaks "for free", with no need for forked specfiles or crazy specfile macros (or behind-the-scenes slight-of-hand).
Some will say that it really goes against the whole Unix spirit and the organizational setup which we've had for 30+ years. I would agree that it's a break with history, but hipster-coders raised on /Libraries and /Applications certainly won't care, and if it carries measurable benefits (beyond just making something internal to flatpaks easier) then I think there's certainly an argument to be made for it. (The possibility of having multiple versions is, for me, enticing.)
It definitely is a change to the organizational setup Fedora has had. I'm not so sure it goes against the Unix spirit in general -- I'm certainly used to having all sorts of stuff in /opt from back in my sysadmin days.
Really my concern is how you'd deal with the more basic issues:
- How does typing "libreoffice" work? Do you also drop symlinks into /usr/bin?
FHS has a provision for /opt/<provider>/bin -- we could put that /opt/fedora/bin in the default $PATH and use that.
- How do things like desktop configuration, icons and whatnot get installed where desktops will look for them?
Something similar, I guess. :)
- Can these "apps" provide libraries or content used by other "apps" or even just regular programs on the system? How do those other things actually find the content?
I would suggest no, at least for libraries. Maybe the Modularity initiative people have a different answer here, though.
- Do you allow multiple versions? How does that change the above three answers? How does ordering work in that case? How do you decide which version is the "main" one, which gets /usr/bin/libreoffice, etc.?
I think allowing multiple versions would be a nice side-effect, but we *could* say that if you need that, use the Flatpak versions. Maybe the alternatives system could be used to moderate which version owns the shared bin link.
I really hope that the answer for the first three is to just add each of these directories to various search paths. That gets hilarious pretty quickly.
Yeah, I think that would get out of control. :)