Joerg Schilling wrote:
Andrew Gabriel <illu...@cucumber.demon.co.uk> wrote:
Nick Zivkovic wrote:
Agreed. Also, I see that /opt and /usr/$consolidation overlap in terms
of their purpose.
For example we have /usr/X11. According to `man filesystem` /opt is
meant to hold add-on/third-party software.
/opt was meant for unbundled software. Ideally, it should be empty
immediately following a full install of a distro, as everything is by
definition bundled. I don't think Solaris ever quite got that right, but
it was almost there. Everything you install after that (which isn't part
of the distro) should be in /opt (and /etc/opt and /var/opt), but a lot
of 3rd-party software developers got that wrong too.
There was a nice talk from Steve Bourne at the Sun User Group meeting in
December 1990. He explained that first /usr/bin was hijacked by the system and
people started with /usr/local. Then external sources hijacked /usr/local and
as a result a FHS summit with most UNIX vendors decided to usr /opt.
I went to an AT&T presentation on the upcoming SVR4 for UNIX source
porters, which was probably 1989 or early 1990, where they went into
this. One of the key reasons for having it outside /usr was that an
upgrade required blowing away all of /usr and reinstalling (there was no
real upgrade capability in their original SRV4.0 other than a
reinstall), and they didn't expect you would want to lose all your
3rd-party/unbundled products. It still wasn't very well thought out
compared with where we are today, but it was vastly better than SVR3.2
which is what commercial organisations were running at the time. This
was also why SVR4 moved home directories out of /usr, leaving us with
the irony of a /usr which no longer contained the users.
We are now nearly 25 years after that /opt decision and still not everybody got
it.
--
Andrew
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