Where'd they go ?

[Ben Scott]

On 11/28/05, Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org> wrote:
> On Sunday 27 November 2005 11:39 pm, Benjamin Scott wrote:
>> Putting distro stuff in /opt/ is a SuSE thing. I haven't seen another
>> distro do that.
>
> That is not entirely true. Most commercial Unix systems use /opt for major
> 3rd party applications.

  Yah, I know that.  :)  I'm talking Linux distros.  The key thing is,
for a Linux distribution, *everything* is a "third-party application".
 If Linux distros followed "commercial Unix" tradition, or source
package defaults, just about the entire system would be in /usr/local/
or /opt/, and /usr/ would be basically empty.  That would be worse
then useless, really, since it destroys the usefulness of the /usr/ vs
/usr/local/ distinction.  So my feeling is that for stuff provided
with and as part of the distribution really belongs in /usr/ (or / of
course).  Obviously, that's my opinion, but I think it's a reasonable
one.  :)

  For stuff provided outside of the distribution, I've encountered two
schools of thought:

  One school of thought is that everything "under package management"
(e.g., RPM on Red Hat/SuSE, dpkg on Debian/Ubuntu, etc.) is also
installed under /usr/, since the package manager should be able to
keep it all figured out.  Stuff built from source, or binaries
installed via file copy or some vendor-specific install tool, belong
in /usr/local/ and/or /opt/.  The benefits here are that the stuff you
have to keep track of yourself (without RPM's help) is all kept
separated.

  The other school of thought is that everything not provided by the
distro goes in /usr/local/ and/or /opt/, regardless of whether or not
it is under package management.  The benefit here is that you can tell
at a glance what was "layered" on top of the base system.

  Both seem reasonable to me.  Personally, I lean towards the former,
but that's mostly personal preference influenced by how I manage my
systems, rather then anything truely objective.

  IMO.  FWIW.  YMMV.  HAND.  :)

-- Ben "TMA" Scott