[Python-Dev] bdist_* to stdlib? (original) (raw)

Bengt Richter bokr at oz.net
Sat Feb 18 00:36:26 CET 2006

On Fri, 17 Feb 2006 14:58:34 -0800, "Guido van Rossum" <guido at python.org> wrote:

On 2/17/06, "Martin v. L=F6wis" <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:

Guido van Rossum wrote: > On 2/16/06, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote: >>/usr/share often is on a different mount; that's the whole rationale >>for /usr/share. > > I don't think I've worked at a place where something like that was > done for at least 10 years. Isn't this argument outdated?

It still is the rationale for putting things into /usr/share, even though I agree that probably nobody actually does that. That, in turn, is because nobody is so short of disk space that you really have to share /usr/share across architectures, and because trying to do the sharing still causes problems (e.g. what if the packaging systems of different architectures all decide to put the same files into /usr/share?) I believe /usr/share was intended only to be used for platform-independent files (e.g. docs, or .py files). linuxbase.org agrees with you, via ref to http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html and more specifically http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#USRSHAREARCHITECTUREINDEPENDENTDATA Another reason why nobody does this is because NFS is slow and unreliable. It's no fun when your NFS server goes down and your machine hangs because someone wanted to save 50 MB per workstation by sharing it. Sometimes a separate mount could be a separate hard disk in the same box, I guess. Apparently it's read-only, so I guess it could also temporarily be a cdrom even.

Regards, Bengt Richter

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