On Monday 03 September 2012 - 15:42:04, Ludwig Nussel wrote:
So nine years ago when I started packaging vdr for SUSE ...
Sorry, but Suse is not known for doing things right :( ... and they don't care much about system quality.
Even though vdr may update some of the files there itself I still think they belong to /etc to make sure they are included in backups by default.
FHS says about /etc: "The /etc hierarchy contains configuration files. A "configuration file" is a local file used to control the operation of a program; it must be static and cannot be an executable binary."
Keep you eyes on "it must be static"!
You could learn from debian systems, where the stuff in /etc is really static. Even with vdr. Vdr's databases reside in /var/lib/vdr where they are changeable by intention. The databases are linked to /etc. So the content from /etc (the links to vdr-databases) is static, but the content of the databases is not. Its not that good as if the vdr would have divided the setup into static and non-static configuration, but it obeys the rules. See http://wiki.debian.org/ReadonlyRoot for advantages of that aproach.
Regarding backup: If you allow your backup application to follow links and save the original, the databases will be saved.
But even better: Teach your SUSE-users to save /var/lib I believe, from backup point of view, /var/lib has the same or even higher importance to get saved, than /etc
I decided to use /var/spool/video (could have been /var/spool/vdr too).
That's a good point!
Lots of VDR-users use VDR as a standalone system and for those systems /var/spool might be more appropriate than /srv
/srv is right, if the VDR-machine offers the recordings like a NAS or MediaServer, so in case the VDR is a backend machine, it might be better to symlink /var/spool/video to /srv/video or the like.
kind regards
Gero