The debian-private mailing list leak, part 1. Volunteers have complained about Blackmail. Lynchings. Character assassination. Defamation. Cyberbullying. Volunteers who gave many years of their lives are picked out at random for cruel social experiments. The former DPL's girlfriend Molly de Blanc is given volunteers to experiment on for her crazy talks. These volunteers never consented to be used like lab rats. We don't either. debian-private can no longer be a safe space for the cabal. Let these monsters have nowhere to hide. Volunteers are not disposable. We stand with the victims.

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Re: /opt and non-free



Joey Hess wrote:
> 
> Speaking as a user here, I don't *want* the layout of my filesystem to
> reflect the copyright of software on it.

If we let users (and producers) build their own packages we need a way
to avoid things like /usr/X11 and related. For example, when I install
Informix (on other Unices) it unpacks directly under /usr/informix and
asks you to add a lot of references into your env variables.
In such a situation the layout of your system reflects the
idiosincracies of commercial software engeneers.

But even GNU sometimes does that way, you know :-)


> What is /opt really for? There must be a purpose for this directory,
> but I don't know what it is. I can't believe that it's what you
> propose.
> 

I don't want to quote the FHS untill it's released, but the purpose of
/opt is to carry "add-on application software" ant its use is a
"well-established practice" in Unix (SVID, iBCS2).

In the discussion about this topic emerged the need to offer a place
where to install packages created without following a particular layout
(tipically commercial ones that have the same layout for all the
architectures for which they are supplied), and a method to adhere to
the "division-by-use" of the the files in the FHS.

With this mechanism, everyone can build a package without having to
follow our policy (commercial firms don't want to, end users are not
aware of) and distribute the .deb in the way they prefere without even
informing us.


> This would introduce masses of incompatability problems between
> debian and other systems. "Oh, you want to run pine? Well, it's got
> a weird copyright, so it's not in /usr/bin with all the other
> software, you have to add /opt/bin to your path..." No thanks.
> 

Well, actually Debian is anyway considered such a deviated system,
because we don't install under /usr/local like most software do as
default. 
The use of /opt has the advantage to avoid the pollution in the user's
environment: /opt/bin would be in the path of every user from the
beginning, like /usr/local/bin is now.


Fabrizio
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