On Sun, Dec 10, 2000 at 12:31:10PM -0600, Mike Meyer wrote:
> Not /usr/local - that's for locally maintained software. I'd rather it
> go on /usr, so I don't like /opt. When I got to choose, I chose
> /usr/opt. But anything other than /usr/local on /usr would do as well.
So do you also put the configurations in ${PREFIX}/etc, or
/usr/local/etc? Even though you got them from a readily
replaceable source, you can't retrieve your local configurations
that way.
> That's true. But if it's packaged, it belongs in an area reserved for
> *packages*. FreeBSD is the only system I know of that coopts
> /usr/local for packages, instead of reserving it for things that are
> locally maintained. Whether that locally maintained software is
> written locally or comes from a third party is irrelevant to this
> discussion.
Well, I'll just stick my oar in for /usr/local. I count myself
among the aesthetically dismayed when I first encountered /opt
on a SunOS box. (Or was that Solaris? Time fades...)
> The critical difference is the "requires local src configuration"
> line. For FreeBSD or any of the ports or packages, I can blow away the
> source tree without worrying about needing it back; I can always get
> it back from FreeBSD again. For the same reason, I don't worry much
> about the binaries. For locally written software, if I lose ths
> source, I'm SOL.
Don't you keep the source that you write somewhere in your home
directory? I do.
> For true third party software, how screwed I am
> depends on how hard it was getting the thing to build on FreeBSD. As a
> general rule, I always save them. The binaries get the same
> treatment. Having to figure out which is which is *much* easier if the
> two are in different directory hierarchies.
Whenever I have to build something outside the ports hierarchy,
I finish by diffing the orig and modified source trees. I put
the source tarball into /usr/ports/distfiles, in case someone at
FreeBSD gets around to building a port of it, and stick the
diffs in my $HOME/src directory.
> Clearly, a package is *not* the same as either third party or locally
> written software. For people who don't care about any of those
> differences, packages co-opting /usr/local doesn't matter. For people
> who do, there's PREFIX - except it doesn't work very well, and can't
> work for binary builds (and with the CDROM set no longer having
> distfiles on it, that's a major PITA).
I agree that PREFIX/LOCALBASE should work: you can't legislate
taste. I'm going to keep it to /usr/local and /usr/X11R6,
though, thanks all the same.
--
Andrew
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