Ok, ok, ok, I think I may have got it. Some of your comments helped
get me on the proper track of distro-oriented thinking where different
systems are picking and choosing a different subset of available
packages, but those packages have predefined locations where they have
to put things. It has rightly been pointed out to me by others here that
what is really needed is for libraries to be placed where they are
needed according to the a posteriori knowledge of the selection of
programs in /{s,}bin _on the local system_.
So, I realized, how about a _package_ (I propose the name fhslib) that
effectively does something like this:
1) Check ldd /{s,}bin/* for dependencies in /usr, and put copies of
of the those libraries in /lib.
2) Keep track (somewhere in /var) of what fhslib has put in /lib.
3) When other packages are installed or removed, fhslib gets
triggered to update.
Then we continue on as currently, with library package maintainers
doing their best to be reasonable in where they think a library
generally properly belongs, so that on any given system fhslib will
hopefully only duplicate a small handful of libraries to pick up the slack.
On my box fhslib would result in a reasonable redundancy of 4M:
$ ldd /{s,}bin/* | /bin/grep usr | cut -f2 -d">" | cut -f1 -d"(" |
sort -u | xargs du -Lhc ; sudo du -sh /lib ; du -sh /usr/lib
1.7M /usr/lib/libcrypto.so.0.9.8
148K /usr/lib/libdbus-glib-1.so.2
60K /usr/lib/libdiscover.so.2
168K /usr/lib/libexpat.so.1
220K /usr/lib/libfuse.so.2
288K /usr/lib/libgobject-2.0.so.0
20K /usr/lib/libgthread-2.0.so.0
68K /usr/lib/libhal.so.1
44K /usr/lib/libhal-storage.so.1
28K /usr/lib/libnfnetlink.so.0
328K /usr/lib/libnl.so.1
352K /usr/lib/libntfs-3g.so.75
160K /usr/lib/libntfs.so.10
44K /usr/lib/libpcsclite.so.1
348K /usr/lib/libssl.so.0.9.8
96K /usr/lib/libz.so.1
4.0M total
370M /lib
2.1G /usr/lib
Not being a package developer (yet!?), I am naive as to how much work it
would take to put fhslib together. Unless someone else really wants to
jump on it, I'd be willing to take this as an opportunity to learn a
little Debian package management and give back to the community that has
given me so much ("free beer").
-Zach
PS I think I would like fhslib to have a priority of "important" so that
someone who installs even a basic Debian system can expect FHS
compliancy. Indeed, in some sense it may be the most "minimal" systems
where it is most important.
