[Pkg-mediawiki-devel] Bug#518944: mediawiki: violation of FHS with regard to extensions location

[Alon Swartz]

Package: mediawiki
Version: 1:1.14.0-1
Severity: normal


The Debian MediaWiki package sets up extensions to be installed in /var/lib.
According to the FHS, /var/lib holds Variable state information:

"""
This hierarchy holds state information pertaining to an application or
the system. State information is data that programs modify while they
run, and that pertains to one specific host. Users must never need to
modify files in /var/lib to configure a package's operation.

State information is generally used to preserve the condition of an
application (or a group of inter-related applications) between
invocations and between different instances of the same application.
State information should generally remain valid after a reboot, should
not be logging output, and should not be spooled data.
"""

A more fitting location would be /usr/lib, as it is used for libraries of
programming and packages.

Seeing that the extensions are more like libraries for the MediaWiki
package, and that they are most likely installed by the local 
administrator and not the package management system (with the exception
of the mediawiki-extensions package, which installs to
/etc/mediawiki-extensions anyway), a more FHS compliant location would
be /usr/local/lib.