From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from mail.pbcl.net ([88.198.119.4] helo=hetzner.pbcl.net) by linuxtogo.org with esmtp (Exim 4.72) (envelope-from ) id 1PnVGR-0002Op-25 for openembedded-devel@lists.openembedded.org; Thu, 10 Feb 2011 13:04:47 +0100 Received: from cambridge.roku.com ([81.142.160.137] helo=[172.30.1.145]) by hetzner.pbcl.net with esmtpsa (TLS1.0:DHE_RSA_AES_256_CBC_SHA1:32) (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1PnVFQ-0002A2-RE for openembedded-devel@lists.openembedded.org; Thu, 10 Feb 2011 13:03:44 +0100 From: Phil Blundell To: openembedded-devel@lists.openembedded.org In-Reply-To: <4D53C412.9090804@dresearch.de> References: <4D53C412.9090804@dresearch.de> Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2011 12:03:55 +0000 Message-ID: <1297339435.2178.23.camel@phil-desktop> Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Evolution 2.30.3 Subject: Re: base-files vs. FHS-2.3 X-BeenThere: openembedded-devel@lists.openembedded.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.11 Precedence: list Reply-To: openembedded-devel@lists.openembedded.org List-Id: Using the OpenEmbedded metadata to build Distributions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2011 12:04:47 -0000 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit On Thu, 2011-02-10 at 11:55 +0100, Steffen Sledz wrote: > While dealing with the /var subdirs i hit some differences between Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (current FHS-2.3) and the base-files package. > > One point is that /var/tmp is symlinked to volatile/tmp but according to the standard this dir contains "Temporary files *preserved between system reboots* ". > > Also /var/cache is symlinked to volatile/cache but the standard describes "The data must remain valid between invocations of the application *and rebooting the system.* " what i would read in the way that /var/cache should be persistent too. > > May be there are other differences. > > In my opinion the symlinking in base-files is buggy and should be fixed. Or am i wrong here? It probably would be good to have a version of base-files which was fully FHS conformant. But there are a significant number of OE target systems where it is simply impossible to comply with these requirements since there is no persistent read/write storage available: the only choice is between flash (persistent but read-only) and ramdisk (read-write but volatile). Clearly, placing /var/tmp or /var/cache in a readonly location is unlikely to produce any useful results so linking them into volatile/ is the least bad option in that situation. Any change to base-files would need to be done with some level of care in order to not break those kinds of setups which do work today. I guess it should be a DISTRO decision whether or not to adhere to the FHS in this area. p.