Where'd they go ?

[Paul Lussier]

Ben Scott <dragonhawk at gmail.com> writes:

>   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.

I tend to agree with this view, except, "there is no /opt, just
/usr/local" :)

>   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.

I believe this is how *BSD does it.  At least OpenBSD does.  Though
it's a little more fine-grained than that.  Anything installed "at
install time" is in /usr, anything installed after that goes in
/usr/local.  Though, that may be a result of the choice of packages
available fat install time is incredibly small, and everything else is
from the ports system, I'm not entirely clear on that.

-- 

Seeya,
Paul