I am very much in favor of the strongly adhered to filesystem layout
that Debian uses. Having all of the configuration files in /etc,
means that when I got a new laptop the only part of the OS I saved
from the old to the new was /etc. Stuff that changes is in /var, that
is great, right where it should be. Architecture specific stuff not
on / goes in /usr.
This leaves all of the non architecture specific stuff (text, html,
perl scripts, emacs lisp, etc.) to go under /usr/share. I use
/usr/local/share to have common TeX, etc. on completely different
architectures. Makes things great for system management. I only need
to install a new bibstyle in one place and my Linux and Tru64 boxes
all find it. This is how it should be.
My problem though, is that Debian only seems to go halfway. Just as I
cross mount /usr/local/share between all my computers, I want to also
cross mount /usr/share between all my Debian boxes. In order for this
to make any sense though, there needs to be some sort of dpkg setting
to say, don't install /usr/share on this machine, it is a client.
I know, this can lead to problems where a package is installed on a
client, but not on the master server. That is my problem as the
administrator though, and shouldn't be anybody else's concern.
Am I just dense, and such a setting is fully documented and I just
need to rtfm? I know, disk space is real cheap, so wasting a few
hundred meg per machine isn't a big deal, and there isn't really
anything in /usr/share that I, as the administrator, need to be
changing, but it is just the principle of the thing. I guess what I
mean is, why call it share if it isn't meant to be shared?
