But sure, absolutely, an installer should prompt the user for an install location, and I think a default under /opt is probably among the best defaults possible, if we consider installing outside $HOME to be reasonable.
* https://man.openbsd.org/hier
* https://man.netbsd.org/hier.7
* https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=hier&sektion=7
* https://man.dragonflybsd.org/?command=hier§ion=7
There was a long time when the Linux world held /opt in disfavour, because officially it required either a stock market ticker name or some other corporate identity to make a subdirectory legitimate. You can still see traces of this in the Solaris descendant operating systems, where pkginfo(5) talks about package names using corporate stock ticker names.
* https://illumos.org/man/5/pkginfo
/opt/SUNW* used to be a very familiar thing to a lot of people.
Maybe enough time has passed for anti-corporate memory to fade. Maybe there's enough corporate backing in the Linux world now to resurrect the idea regardless.
Maybe /opt/RHT* is the shape of things to come. (-:
I've never over the years seen the systemd people advocate for /opt, though.
Are CLI tools or low-level, privileged software (e.g. anything that requires root) also distributed using flatpak or snap these days?
Flatpak hasn't really taken the same path, it doesn't have much utility for anything other than desktop apps.
The problem is that systemd evokes some pretty visceral negative reactions in people. I still have mixed feelings about it, but, by and large, I encounter minimal real-world issues with it. Just because systemd has decided to do something that violates the older FHS3/4 standards, doesn't automatically make it a bad thing. Maybe what they're doing is a better way. Maybe not.
The most obvious example that comes to mind is /usr/lib/os-release, which file-hierarchy(7) indicates should actually be in /usr/share/os-release.
hulitu•4h ago
No. freedesktop.org is the place where standards go to die and CADT development takes place.