After last post about a FHS amendment to address the structure of user's home folders, I received a lot of comments and there is one very significant thing that can be changed in the proposal - instead of having $HOME/{.data|.cache|.config}/appname structure, to change that to a mandatory $HOME/.library/appname/{cache|config|...} . This version still has all the benefits of the first solution (configuration for an application can be easily identified and erase, and all cache can easily be excluded from backups using "$HOME/.library/*/cache" regexp) and also has additional benefits, main of which is the ability to later introduce the concept of user installed packages. The idea is that it would be possible to support having /bin, /lib and /share subdirectories in these application directories thus making an ability for the whole application to e packed in a single directory and allowing the application to be installed simply by unpacking this directory. I admit that much of this is glanced over from MacOS X world, but I do not think that it diminishes the idea itself.
Some problems appear there - support of these distributed bin folders, support of separate lib folders, handling of application plugins, handling of dependencies, handling of the application menu, upgrading notifications for the user software vs. system software. But nothing there that can not be solved. I feel that this can bring together FHS and LSB by providing something of an API for software being installed by users. Having no registry of the software in this solution allows for some interesting things, for example having multiple versions of one program just by renaming the application folder.
A lot of specification work is required here, therefore I proposed a workshop on this topic in Debconf7. I hope to have something that everyone can agree on and maybe even some code by then, so that after Debconf7 there can be a formal policy amendment proposal.
So there are two questions: