I could have sworn I had seen something about this on list in the past 
month, and didn't have time to answer, but I cannot for the life of me 
find it. Unfortunately, /usr/libexec is not a part of the current FHS, 
but, is a part of the 3.0 draft 1 (which hopefully will become official 
someday).

See:

http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#USRLIBLIBRARIESFORPROGRAMMINGANDPA 


and

http://www.linuxbase.org/betaspecs/fhs/fhs.html#usrlibLibrariesForProgrammingAndPa

Now I bring this up because Apache deliberately using /usr/libexec, and 
years of avoiding this directory like the plague really irked me. I was 
gonna complain about it not being compliant, and then I read the FHS 
draft, where something else caught my eye. The /usr/libexec directory, 
which is likely to be a part of the standard, allows the use of a 
sub-directory but does not require it. This reminded me of an old 
problem with gvfs and policy-kit/u-whatever (IIRC).

We should probably make a conscious effort to gradually undo the past 15 
years of moving private stuff into /usr/lib/<packagename>, but I'm 
actually more curious as to the rationale of forcefully separating these 
items. Would it not be better to let the package maintainer make this 
decision for us going forward? It might mean making a little bit of a 
mess in /usr/libexec, but it is one less editor responsibility, and 
actually might save a patch or two going forward. I have only one 
specific instance where it has made any difference whatsoever (gvfs), 
but that debacle was entertaining, despite being annoying. Monkey, 
football...I think my comments in the patch header way back when 
reflected as much. :-)

Any thoughts? Objections?

-- DJ Lucas


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