The problems of requiring /opt

[Shane Fagan]

Hey,

Id like to chime in here too. I was talking with didrocks about this and
he was saying its not a trivial change to switch to /opt. Since small
apps like those made with Quickly are the more or less target audience
for this repo. I suggest that we relax this restriction for this release
of this repo and bring it in for 11.04 to give time for Quickly and the
architecture to catch up. Jono can we do this do a vote on this or do we
need the TB to vote on amending the rules?


--fagan

On Wed, 2010-09-22 at 11:47 +1200, Andrew Mitchell wrote:
> 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
> 
>