Conflict between GNU CS and FHS

[Linus Walleij]

As has been found in the Fedora Core bugzilla, we discovered a conflict 
between the GNU Coding Standards and FHS.

Quoting FHS:
(http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#PURPOSE18)

  "/usr is shareable, read-only data. That means that /usr should be
   shareable between various FHS-compliant hosts and must not be written
   to."

Quoting GNU Coding Standards:
(http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Directory-Variables.html)

  "'sharedstatedir'
   The directory for installing architecture-independent data files which
   the programs modify while they run. This should normally be
   /usr/local/com, but write it as $(prefix)/com.

Since the latter will resolve into /usr/com if $prefix is /usr (which is 
common when building a package for a system), a conflict arise, where FHS 
says it should not be written to, whereas GNU CS says it is even 
recommended to do so, provided the data is architecture-independent.

Could this issue be resolved? I know $sharedstatedir is somewhat obscure, 
but not we have a program actually using it.

Please visit our Bugzilla ticket for this if you have the time:
http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=183370

Yours,
Linus Walleij