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

[Romain Beauxis]

	Hi !

Le Monday 09 March 2009 12:59:12 Alon Swartz, vous avez écrit :
> The Debian MediaWiki package sets up extensions to be installed in
> /var/lib. According to the FHS, /var/lib holds Variable state information:
(...)
> 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.

I think you misundertood the FHS specifications. Firstly, /usr/lib shouldn't 
be modified by the administrator, but ony by packages. Locally modified files 
go to /usr/local/lib and the like.

Secondly, /usr/lib is meant for binary data, whereas extensions, being php 
text data, are architecture-independant, and, as such, should go 
to /usr/share, or /usr/local/share for custom extensions.

That is in particular the case for the extensions installed by the 
mediawiki-extensions package:
mediawiki-extensions: /usr/share/mediawiki-extensions/RenameUserJob.php
mediawiki-extensions: /usr/share/mediawiki-extensions/SpecialLastUserLogin.php
mediawiki-extensions: /usr/share/mediawiki-extensions/SpecialRenameuser.i18n.php
mediawiki-extensions: /usr/share/mediawiki-extensions/SpecialRenameuser.php
mediawiki-extensions: /usr/share/mediawiki-extensions/SpecialRenameuser_body.php
mediawiki-extensions: /usr/share/mediawiki-extensions/SprintfDateCompat.php
mediawiki-extensions: /usr/share/mediawiki-extensions/SyntaxHighlight_GeSHi.class.php
mediawiki-extensions: /usr/share/mediawiki-extensions/SyntaxHighlight_GeSHi.i18n.php
mediawiki-extensions: /usr/share/mediawiki-extensions/SyntaxHighlight_GeSHi.php
mediawiki-extensions: /usr/share/mediawiki-extensions/captcha.py
mediawiki-extensions: /usr/share/mediawiki-extensions/inputbox.php
mediawiki-extensions: /usr/share/mediawiki-extensions/maintenance/SpamBlacklist.php
(etc..)

Eventually, the mediawiki package does not enforce any specific location for 
the extensions, since they are loaded from the configuration file. And this 
configuration file belongs in /etc/mediawiki/, which corresponds to the 
requirement:
  "Users must never need to modify files in /var/lib to configure a package's 
operation."

Can I close the bug, or, perhaps there is something I did not understand from 
your original issue ?



Romain