I read that Daniel Quinlan has just sent to c.o.l.a the `FHS 2.0' which the successor to the FSSTND group has been working on.
IMO it is in some ways a bad standard, particularly insofar as is contains a number of gratuitous changes made partially in the name of BSD compatibility and partially out of an IMO broken or mistimed sense of aesthetics. In particular: * /var/lib has been renamed /var/state. * The mail spool is now specified as /var/mail, rather than /var/spool/mail, and various other junk that BSD puts in /var directly was grandfathered in (eg, /var/lib/games changes to /var/games). Some of these changes might have been a reasonable thing to do before the FSSTND was released and widely deployed. Now they are IMO unreasonable. I was unsuccessful in my attempts to divert these changes by talking to the FHS list. I was accused of being `linux-centric'. The FHS 2 has some good parts, though. /var/cache and /usr/share are now specified, and there's something about /opt. My preferred stance for Debian would be to specify that we follow the FHS but with certain exceptions. The exceptions ought to be decided on here, but broadly speaking I think we should make an exception where a directory or hierarchy has been moved from its location the FSSTND, without any good technical reason. BTW, I refuse to be held responsible for the consequences if people think we should attempt to move /var/lib/dpkg. Ian.
