The problems of requiring /opt

[Andrew Mitchell]

Hi all,

I was hoping to get this discussed before the policy was published, but
no such luck :)
 From what I can see, it is not practical to require or suggest that
packages use /opt for all files given our lack of support for it in
development tools. The target audience for the post-release apps process
is developers who have relatively simple applications & who do not want
to spend most of their time trying to get the packaging right, yet none
of our common packaging tools make installing into /opt easy.
 Quickly creates a packaging template that is extremely simple, but with
the use of CDBS, is non-obvious how to change it to install anywhere but
the default paths. This will need to be changed at some point if we are
wanting people to use it to create packages, and I don't think this can
be done in time for maverick with the current freezes for release.
 As well as quickly, I believe that we'll get a few submissions of
packages that have been done 'manually' or with dh-make, and we do not
currently have documentation for people to look at for changing their
packaging to place files into /opt.
 For proper desktop integration, we would need to have the menu looking
for .desktop files in /opt, the panel looking for applets there, all of
which I believe have not been changed for maverick.
 In short, I hope that we can change the packaging requirements to drop
the need to use /opt, at least for this release.

Thanks,
Andrew