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

Mats Wichmann mats at wichmann.us
Mon May 16 07:13:10 PDT 2011


On 05/15/2011 10:00 AM, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> On Sat, 14.05.11 22:52, Christoph Anton Mitterer (calestyo at scientia.net) wrote:
>
>> Hi.
>>
>>
>> 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".
>> So on would have e.g.:
>> /local/bin
>> /local/sbin
>> /local/usr
>> /local/etc
>> /local/var
>> (and their typical sub-hierarchies).
>
> I already have trouble enough understanding why we currently have both
> /usr/local and /opt. Both appear to be places for 3rd party software,
> but use different layouts. I am tempted to say that we should just get
> rid of /usr/local.

For different audiences.  The simplistic way to view it is the split is 
between distros - most of the filesystem; packaged software that comes 
from offsite (commercial, community repos, etc.) - /opt; for stuff 
that's constructed locally, probably via "grab from internet; unpack; 
configure; make install) - /usr/local.  There's nothing sophisticated 
here: one could think of various coordination schemes to keep people 
from stepping on each other but this scheme simply says "this is someone 
else's area, stay out".

> That said, /opt appears like a pretty badly though out
> solution. i.e. any package you install there which need drop in files
> in some system dirs (i.e. dbus service, pk policy and so on), also needs
> to add something to /etc or /usr, so I really wonder what the point of

Yes, there's no simpleminded answer for files that have to go in a 
specific place in order to be correctly picked up.  They just have to go 
there.  You can certainly conceive of installation/registration services 
(the crontab command is one kind of example of this, the install_initd 
command called out in LSB is another - here you don't drop files in a 
location blindly, but instead call a command which "does the right 
thing" whatever it may need to be on that system) but those don't exist 
universally for all the special locations.  If you do have to drop a 
file in one of these special locations (if you're a package that is not 
a distro package) all we can ask is you try to choose your filename 
wisely so as to minimise current and future naming conflicts.  For dbus 
that's clean enough as it tends to use domain-ish naming like 
"org.freedesktop.UDisks.service"




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