[fhs-discuss] on the /*/local/ hierarchies

Martin Bähr mbaehr at email.archlab.tuwien.ac.at
Sat May 14 18:09:52 PDT 2011


On Sat, May 14, 2011 at 10:52:23PM +0000, Christoph Anton Mitterer wrote:
> 1) One idea that could be discussed (although it's very unlikely that this
> is accepted) is, whether all of the current "/*/local*" directories are
> moved to it's own hierarchy below "/local".

i have been doing this for years on my machines, because i always found
it irritating that mounting local would depend on mounting /usr first.
it seems cleaner to me to have all mounts go into directories in /
just like /opt (why is that not /usr/opt?)

of course if /usr is not a seperate mountpoint then this becomes moot.
(it is more important to have /local (or /usr/local) as a seperate
mountpoint, because it is not under packet management control, like opt.

> 2) The current "definition" of the "/*/local" hierarchies is quite strange
> (IMHO):
> "The /usr/local hierarchy is for use by the system administrator when
> installing software locally."
> 
> "locally" can have many meanings: "local on disk", "on a locally exported
> network filesystem", etc. etc.

the same is true for /opt

> So I'd at least reserve the usage of "/opt/local" for "local usage".

why? anything you'd want to put in /opt/local you should just put in /local 

i see 3 ways to install packages:
package manager:     goes whereever the package defines it.  hopefully /usr
source:              goes whereever the admin defines it. defaults to /usr/local
3rd-party installer: goes whereever the installer defines it.  hopefully /opt

greetings, martin.
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