Re: tlug: make /usr/local/ a link to /usr/ ?

[Rex Walters <rex@example.com>]

>>>>> Michael Casinghino writes:  (on 20 Nov 98)

> I have moral objections to making distinctions between /usr/local/ and
> /usr/.  I mean isn't _everything_ local?  Really?  Is there a reason I
> shouldn't do this?

The intent behind local originally was for "local" additions not part of
the O.S. from the systems vendor.  That is, /usr/local should be empty
(except for possibly a directory hierarchy, {bin,etc,man,...})
immediately after installing an O.S. from the vendor's source media.
Any locally compiled software would then go into /usr/local so that it
wouldn't be overwritten by vendor patches and O.S. revs.  If it was a
separate filesystem, you could even leave it unmounted during a patch
installation or OS upgrade and be *sure* you're local stuff would remain
untouched.

If you're religious about only using a decent package manager and well
designed packages, then /usr/local should be completely unnecessary.
The package manager keeps a database of what is installed where and
prevents conflicts for you.  Before RPM and Debian (and before Sun's
pkgadd) the admin had to keep track of local customizations manually,
and /usr/local made sense.

Somewhat of an aside, but one of the things that really irritated me
about Sun was all the cruft they kept putting in /etc/rc.local release
after release.  According to the original intent, this file should
have always been empty after a system install, but Sun made it a
critical file in the boot process that did all sorts of things, then
told admins to modify the heck out of it whenever they wanted to add or
change something!  Grrr.  Auspex added a file /etc/rc.local.`hostname`
that was for truly local additions explicitly to prevent problems after
an OS upgrade (we wouldn't touch it, just source it a the end of
rc.local).

Regards,
-- 
Rex
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