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. :)
--
Matthew Miller
<mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader