Title

FHS - Filesystem Hierarchy Standard and Parrot

AUTHOR

Florian Ragwitz <rafl@debian.org>

VERSION

  Maintainer: Florian Ragwitz
  Date: 5 Dez 2005
  Last Modified: 5 Dez 2005
  Number: 0
  Version: 1

This document introduces to the FHS, the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, and how those concern Parrot.

INTRODUCTION

The FHS defines some rules for file and directory placement under UNIX-like operating systems. This supports interoperability of applications, system administration tools, development tools, and scripts as well as greater uniformity of documentation for these systems.

DIRECTORIES

There's a large amount of directories explained in the FHS that are not explained here. The reason for this is that not all of them are concerning Parrot.

/etc

Does parrot have things where it makes sense to configure them using a config file? I don't think so.

/tmp

All temporary files should be placed here. Parrot could use this directory for files that are generated during the compile of parrot code to native executables.

/usr

/usr contains is shareable, read-only data. Any information that is host-specific or varies with time is stored elsewhere.

/usr/bin

This is the primary directory of executable commands on the system. All executables that are intended to be called directly by the user (i.e. parrot, parrot_debugger, pbc_disassemble, pbc_dump, pbc_info, pbg_merge, ...) should go here. The current version number should be appended to the binaries itself and a symlink needs to be created that points from the binary with version number to the normal name of the file without a version. That makes installing more than one version possible.

Executables that are for internal use only are stored elsewhere.

/usr/include

This is where all of the system's general-use include files for the C programming language should be placed.

For parrot this is the content of include/parrot. It should be placed in /usr/include/parrot/$(VERSION (i.e. /usr/include/parrot/0.4.0), including those files in include/parrot that are generated during build time.

/usr/lib

/usr/lib includes object files, libraries, and internal binaries that are not intended to be executed directly by users or scripts.

This is libparrot$(SOEXT).$(SOVERSION) if the parrot binary was linked dynamically. Otherwise nothing.

Also Parrot usees a single subdirectory called /usr/lib/parrot to store all architecture-dependent data exclusively used by parrot. These files are grouped by the parrot version they belong to. So we'll have /usr/lib/parrot/0.4.0, /usr/lib/parrot/0.4.1, etc.

All .pbc and .fpmc files should go there.

.pbc files are kind of architecture independent, because parrot can run PBCs created on any architecture on any architecture, but because .pbc files created on 32 bit platforms differ from those created on 64 bit platforms and the performance of executing bytecode created on an architecture with another address width is much slower we consider parrot bytecode to be architecture dependent.

/usr/share

The /usr/share hierarchy is for all read-only architecture independent data files. Parrot stores those files in /usr/share/parrot/$(VERSION). For example all .pasm and .pir files should go there as well as data files for libraries like images and such.

/usr/share/man

Manpages are read-only architecture independent data files as well, but they belong into /usr/share/man instead of /usr/share/parrot/ so they are in $MANPATH and can be viewed using the man command.

/usr/share/doc

All documentation as well as examples should go into a subdirectory of /usr/share/doc.

VIOLATIONS

/usr/examples
Examples should go into /usr/share/doc/examples.
/usr/docs
This belongs into /usr/share/doc/docs or something similar.
/usr/runtime
This needs to be split up into /usr/lib and /usr/share according to the rules that are given in the DIRECTORIES section.
/usr/include/parrot
This directory conforms to the FHS, but makes it impossible to have more than one version of parrot installed at once. It should be /usr/include/parrot/$(VERSION).
/usr/bin
The files in /usr/bin also lack support for multiple installed parrot versions. Also if we build a shared parrot and shared parrot utils the executables in this directory have a '_shared' suffix which is bad.
/usr/imcc
This directory should be removed. It only contains documentation and examples which belong somewhere else.
/usr/LICENSES
Move this to /usr/share/doc/ or just remove it if it's legal.
/usr/NEWS, /usr/PBC_COMPAT, ...
This is also documentation for /usr/share/doc.
/usr/parrot-config.pir
This is a command which can be called from the user. It should be in /usr/bin, maybe without the .pir suffix.

SOURCES

FHS 2.3 - http://www.pathname.com/fhs/