[gentoo-dev] RFC: Introducing /srv into Gentoo Linux

[Stuart Herbert]

Hi everyone,

The Linux Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) 2.3, released 29th Jan 2004, 
introduced a new top-level directory, /srv.  It's basically a hierarchy for 
storing file trees for services.

You can read more about this here:
http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#SRVDATAFORSERVICESPROVIDEDBYSYSTEM

As part of the work on GLEP #11, I'm proposing that the default location (yes, 
it *will* be configurable for people with existing installations) for 
websites becomes /srv/www instead of /var/www.  So, for a non-vhost system, 
the local website would be installed into /srv/www/localhost/htdocs/.

We also need somewhere for backup tools to default to for writing backups.  
I'm working on an ebuild for backuppc, and I propose that this, by default, 
uses /srv/backups/<$PN>/ as the place to write backup files.

Longer term, I'm sure there are other trees that could find a natural home 
under /srv.  The various SCM tools could be pointed here, for example.  
Portage itself is one strong candidate.  Having portage in /usr does make it 
difficult to run a system with /usr mounted readonly most of the time.

I don't want to just dive in and commit ebuilds that use these new locations 
without some discussion first ;-)  The move to /var/www was forced on us (and 
on Gentoo users) because we needed to get a security fix out for Apache at 
the time.  If we do this - and I think we should - I'm keen that we're able 
to do this with a lot of support.

So, what do you think?
Stu
-- 
Stuart Herbert                                              stuart@g.o
Gentoo Developer                                       http://www.gentoo.org/
Beta packages for download            http://dev.gentoo.org/~stuart/packages/
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