Where'd they go ?

[Tom Buskey]

On 11/29/05, Benjamin Scott <dragonhawk at iname.com> wrote:
>
>   My understanding (which is basically based on a couple of FAQ's, so take
> this with a grain of salt) is that the "core" or "base" system is
> installed
> in </> and </usr/>.  That's all the traditional old-school Nix stuff,
> dating
> back to when BSD actually was the Berkley Software Distribution.  The
> "ports"
> collection is all the stuff (e.g., Samba) that's been ported to BSD,
> pre-configured.  You're still building from source, in the traditional Nix
> way, so of course it goes in /usr/local/.


If you really want to go back :-)  The original unix on PDP-7 (even the
PDP-11 later?) had 2 hard drives.  One was small & fast.  One was larger &
slower.  Stuff that everyone used  often (ed, sh, test, cc, ar, grep) went
on the small one, /.  HOME and other stuff (awk, libraries) went to /usr.
Later (in SunOS) /usr might not be mounted on boot, things in root tended to
be statically linked.  The original unix didn't have dynamic libraries.

/usr/local was a sysadmin convention and was usually a seperate partition or
disk.  Most freeware defaulted to /usr/local.

Before Sun pushed /opt with Solaris, vendors would install stuff wherever
they liked, usually under /usr.  They wouldn't run from elsewhere, except
maybe a symbolic link.  When you upgraded the OS, that got clobbered.
Having stuff in /opt kept it out of the OS and your installed freeware.

In Solaris 2.3 days, sunfreeware.com had packages that installed under
/opt.  They've since changed to /usr/local.


--
> Ben <dragonhawk at iname.com>
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A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad
measures.
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