Thanks for the pointer; I read through it.

It seemed to be a very linux-centric discussion; sometimes it seems like
FHS is a broader standard and sometimes it seems like it is specifically
for GNU/Linux systems. I'd be curious if you have comments on that, and
thus some insight on how amanda should approach this, since amanda
supports a number of BSD variants, Solaris, Mac OS X, and probably more
(I'm not clear on the status of windows and other 'workstation unix'
flavors since I don't use them). My own amanda usage is NetBSD, Linux,
Mac OS X, and FreeBSD.

I have recently committed updates to pkgsrc for amanda, but am not quite
the maintainer. pkgsrc has its own standards for where things belong,
more or less following the traditional BSD hierarchy (
http://man.netbsd.se/?find=hier+7+;162 ).

Last I read about this, FHS and BSD's hier were fairly close, but I have
never understood the intent.

To me the larger question is being a good citizen within the context of
a large number of packaging systems, and that's mostly a matter of
having configure options to put various pieces in various places, or at
least the pieces about which opinions differ.

With resspect to the discussion you pointed to, I see the point about
centralizing files, but having a rescue CD with binary packges seems to
be the most sensible option, and then there's backups of control files.
But it would seem awkward to torque around all installs to make this
better, and I have to come down on the "comply with standards" side. My
real point is that "standards" is a larger set, and the source package
should be easily buildable for a number of them.

On Tue, Mar 4, 2008 at 7:16 PM, Greg Troxel < gdt%40ir.bbn.com">gdtir.bbn.com> wrote:
&gt; I have recently committed updates to pkgsrc for amanda, but am not quite
&gt; the maintainer. pkgsrc has its own standards for where things belong,
> more or less following the traditional BSD hierarchy (
> http://man.netbsd.se/?find=hier+7+;162 ).

This is true of Gentoo, as well, for example. There's general
agreement on FHS, but each distro has its preferences.

Taking the birds-eye view of packaging for Amanda, we try to do what
you suggest: Amanda itself has all the knobs you could want to figure
out where to install things. It's then up to various packaging
systems to specify where they want things.

The levels of support for packaging for various OS's varies, based
mostly on interest. The port{s,age}-based distros, of course,
maintain their own stuff, and we try to help out when requested.
Zmanda provides builds for lots of Linuxes: Debian / Ubuntu, Fedora
3-7, OpenSUSE 10, RHEL 3-5, and SLES 9-10. These packages are
designed as best we know how, but we're certainly open to suggestions.
We keep all of the packaging equipment in subversion under
packaging/. Dan Locks, who's lurking here, has been working on a
Debian build which should be ready soon.

As distributors of an Enterprise client that interacts with other
Zmanda products, we have different requirements from community builds.
So some of the knobs are there for us to turn.

Of late, John E. Hein, one of the Platform Experts, has been offering
invaluable help with building and packaging on FreeBSD. Thanks for
your help!

Dustin

--
Storage Software Engineer
http://www.zmanda.com