[Rpm-maint] RFC: SUSE/openSUSE's proposed relocation of /var/lib/rpm

[Richard Brown]

On 2017-10-10 20:05, Colin Walters wrote:

> My opinion here boils down to: if rpm upstream is happy with 
> /usr/lib/rpmdb,
> I'm happy to do the work of changing rpm-ostree to use that.

That's great news, I'm happy to help if I can

> (Longer version: I don't find the "sharable architecture-independent
> data" argument to
>  be a very strong one today; I'm sure one could find people doing that 
> but
>  I suspect most of those people are doing full NFS root or PXE-live +
> NFS-for-/usr
>  etc.  But OTOH, I don't think it'll be difficult for rpm-ostree to
> make the move,
>  and I definitely like the "db" suffix, so I'm ending up as a weak-ish 
> +1)

When I started out looking at this, I agreed with you.
I started the discussion within the openSUSE community advocating for 
following in rpm-ostrees footsteps with /usr/share.
But the arguments, not just theoretical, but real world examples where 
/usr/share would be problematic but /usr/lib not were compelling.
Giving up on the idea of /usr/share led to plenty of pitchforks and 
torches being put away, especially once we added the "db" suffix also :)

> Random question: Is OpenSUSE planning to make this change for their
> container/Docker images too, or just host systems managed via snapper?

We're planning on making this change for all of our distributions via 
all of their distribution methods, for consistencies sake.
Given how we build our containers, we'd actually have to do extra work 
to exclude my patch and restore the old location once my submit-request 
is accepted in OBS :)


-- 
Richard Brown
Linux Distribution Engineer - Future Technology Team
Chairman - openSUSE

Phone +4991174053-361
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