On Thu, 2007-04-12 at 10:50 +0200, solsTiCe d'Hiver wrote:
> hi.
> why can't you bear to see some software lie in /opt ? 
> what's so annoying about that ?
> 
> so please, tell us:
> What's the real reason to move xfce and gnome to /usr ? 
> to please some loudly users who whant that move ?
> to fix what issues ? 

Advantages of a /usr prefix in case of gnome:

- no need for a new login after installing packages like gnome-common
- no need to move icons from /opt/gnome/share/icons to /usr/share/icons
- no need to move themes from /opt/gnome/share/themes
to /usr/share/themes
- no need to exclude metacity themes from that
- files are spread far less over the filesystem (desktops have to search
4 prefixes for icons, themes and .desktop files as it is now)

I think this summarizes the most important issues we have with a /opt
prefix. Given the things above, leaving one of those steps out will
result in a buggy package, where it wouldn't result in a buggy package
when the package is in /usr. An example of this is icons in the hicolor
theme:

hicolor lives in /usr, where it is indexed. Buggy packages stuff these
icons in /opt/xfce4 and /opt/gnome, where these are not indexed. GTK2
searches for the icon, mmaps the cache in /usr, doesn't find it, stops
looking for it if the icon only exists in the hicolor theme. Result:
broken icon.
When these packages would be installed in /usr, the lookup would still
be broken because the cache doesn't include the icon, but the chance is
much higher that a different package will rebuild the cache and include
the missing icons. When these icons lived in /opt/gnome, the cache would
never ever include it, because it's outside the prefix.



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