On Wednesday 31 December 2008, Duncan wrote:

> Except that... in theory, some or all of those apps could technically be
> used on/for other distributions and platforms as well.

Yes, this is the theory but I think they'll be never ported to other 
distributions.

> Few/none of the other apps, regardless of which distribution they started
> on, are in directories based on distribution name, I don't believe it
> fits FHS (as genone pointed out), and while there may be reasons to break
> standards on occasion, they need to be pretty good to justify the hassle
> and confusion, and frankly, I just don't see this as being that good.

Honestly the current situation is a little confused, this is the reason of my 
proposal. Until those applications are used *only* inside gentoo I wouldn't 
bother about FHS because it has been thought to uniform the filesystem 
between all the distribution on the market and this makes sense when you have 
*common* application installed.

> Portage is certainly a candidate for other distributions/platforms, and
> eselect and genkernel (I guess that's what owns module-rebuild?) could be
> as well, particularly on Gentoo based distributions.

module-rebuild is a standalone package supported also by linux-mod.eclass. Its 
purpose is the recompilation of modules after a kernel upgrade. It's also 
true that this utility might be substituted (with portage 2.1.6.4) with 
$(emerge /lib/modules).

> Herdstat doesn't appear to be in the Gentoo tree any longer, so that can
> be eliminated from the list.

Yes, you're right.

> Even the one that's currently under gentoo, enews, arguably doesn't
> belong there, since I see files from other overlays there, and some
> overlays are independent and may be in fact ultimately targeted primarily
> at distributions other than Gentoo.

I suppose that someone was thinking about collecting all gentoo related files 
in a common place when /var/lib/gentoo/news was introduced.

Fabio