Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 18th Aug 2008 23:33 UTC, submitted by Charles Wilson
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Member since:
2006-01-10
I'm confused Thom. On the one hand you say you're an advanced user and you complain that you can't have two different versions installed? You download the tarball, extract it to it's directory, compile it, run it with ./program_name and you're good to go.
Who cares if the package manager doesn't know about it, and who cares if it doesn't create a shiny menu entry for you. The fact of the matter is, that because you're an 'advanced' user, you are not the type of person who should even be caring if the directories are /bin or /Programs. An advanced user would know better.
The FHS doesn't prevent you from having multiple versions of anything. Usually when you download a program, and extract it, it creates a program-name-0.x style folder for you anyhow, so you could still have compiled and running program-name-0.1 and program-name-0.2 etc.
Sounds to me like you're just whining about a non-issue.
If you want to see a proper way that a distribution can use the FHS, look at Debian. Their strict packaging guidelines make sure that there is always a /usr/share/doc/package directory and at least a README in there.
I do agree that not all distributions are as good at keeping it clean and lean as Debian.
The fact that people always say "Oh, but the files are all over the place" really hasn't done any research into Debian's packaging rules.