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

[Alon Swartz]

Thanks for the quick reply!

Romain Beauxis wrote:
> 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.

I agree, I never meant to imply otherwise.

> 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.

Thanks for clearing up the binary data bit, I missed that...

/usr/share and /usr/local/share is a better fit, which is why I don't
understand why the package symlinks /usr/share/mediawiki/extensions to
/var/lib/mediawiki/extensions