Re: [arch-general] Custom libexecdir not recommended for gnome

On Mon, Jul 2, 2012 at 6:53 AM, Lukáš Jirkovský wrote:

On 1 July 2012 22:17, Clemens Buchacher wrote:

...

Hi,

I'd like to bring to your attention the discussion surrounding gnome-shell/networkmanager bug #679212 (NetworkManager VPN secrets: NetworkAgent internal error):

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=679212

A fix for this particular bug is under way. The cause for the bug was Arch Linux's use of different libexecdirs for gnome-shell and networkmanager plugins (/usr/lib/gnome-shell and /usr/lib/networkmanager, respectively), instead of the default /usr/libexec. This is in accordance with Arch Packaging Standards:

"Avoid using /usr/libexec/ for anything. Use /usr/lib/${pkgname}/ instead." [1]

What is the motivation for this rule? In response to the above bug report, a gnome-shell dev says that he "could consider this weird libexecdir setting a distribution problem." Since this seems to be an unusual setting, I suspect that there might still be many more bugs lurking around for which Arch Linux plays beta tester. Indeed, this is not the first time that I am having trouble with Arch Linux packages using custom installation directories [2].

Maybe it's not such a big deal and it's just me having some tough luck (2 events do not make a good statistic). But expectations upstream seem to contradict the Arch Linux rule, so I wanted to bring it up for discussion.

Clemens

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Packaging_Standards#Package_etique... [2] http://gnu-octave-repository.2306053.n4.nabble.com/geometry-1-4-0-cannot-han...

libexec is not part of FHS, so I would say it's gnome guys who should fix that.

As far as I know, Fedora/RedHat are the only ones to use this location. Unless I'm mistaken there is a push internally there to stop using it and instead use /usr/lib/<pkgname> like everyone else. Aside from that, it really makes no sense to distinguish between the two folders, it is perfectly possible to have binaries that should belong to both. -t