Package: base Severity: wishlist Dear Maintainer,
The Linux Filesystem Hierarchy Standard specifies that all platform libraries must be installed under /usr/lib. See the current FHS standard document, section 4.6. Subdirectories under /usr/lib are permitted for individual packages, but not for platforms. Libraries for non-native platforms should be installed under /usr/lib<platform>, i.e. /usr/lib32. Debian currently has a /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu under which many, but not all packages install their libraries. Having some packages install libraries under /usr/lib and other packages install libraries under /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu creates confusion and makes it impossible to detect that a library is installed. Because there is no standard for the platform name (on other distributions, x86_64 can be detected as x86_64-unknown-gnu by gcc), it is not possible to create a general method for library detection, and requires resorting to either hardcoded dir names per distribution or a brute force search of the filesystem. Because Debian is currently the base for most of the major distributions, and the source of their packages, changing this policy should originate with Debian. Merging the contents of /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu into /usr/lib is the policy compliant with the FHS and Debian should lead by this good example. -- System Information: Debian Release: 8.2 APT prefers stable APT policy: (500, 'stable') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Kernel: Linux 3.16.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/1 CPU core) Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
