Re: [gentoo-dev] rfc: moving default location of portage tree

[William Hubbs]

On Wed, Jul 11, 2018 at 06:24:20PM -0400, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 11, 2018 at 6:11 PM Richard Yao <ryao@g.o> wrote:
> >
> > Is it a violation of the FHS? /usr is for readonly data and the portage tree is generally readonly, except when being updated. The same is true of everything else in /usr.
> >
>
> It is application metadata.  It belongs in /var.  No other packages
> write to /usr when they're doing internal updates.  Obviously you need
> a writable /usr to actually install package changes, but that
> shouldn't be necessary just to sync the repository.
>
> I was asking around and it seems like most distros stick their
> repositories in /var/lib.  I can't imagine that too many would have
> even considered sticking them in /usr.

That is the other part of this debate, some are saying /var/lib, and
others are saying /var/db.

 It turns out that /var/db is much more common than I thought it was
 (it exists in all *bsd variants at least), so that could be an argument
 for putting the repos in there.

> > I am confused as to how we only now realized it was a FHS violation when it has been there for ~15 years. I was under the impression that /usr was the correct place for it.
>
> It has certainly been pointed out in the past.  Nothing was changed
> for the same reason that nothing will probably be changed this time -
> people don't like change and the people who know better just slowly
> patch around Gentoo's oddities.  Somebody was just posting a manifesto
> about deploying more experimental technologies, and here we can't move
> a repository out of /usr.

Another reason this couldn't be changed in the past was catalyst had a
lot of hard coded references to /usr/portage. This has been fixe. in
catalyst-3 and I understand that releng is now using catalyst-3.

William