Just a quick aside comment to say that you are linking to an 11 year-old version of the confusingly named FHS (Filesystem Hierarchy Standard) defining the FSH (FileSystem Hierarchy).
The latest version is 3.0, from June this year. Although your verbatim is unchanged in the current version, here is a link to the same section of version 3.0: http://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/FHS_3.0/fhs/ch04s09.html Benjamin Lefoul ________________________________________ From: owner-scientific-linux-us...@listserv.fnal.gov [owner-scientific-linux-us...@listserv.fnal.gov] On Behalf Of Nico Kadel-Garcia [nka...@gmail.com] Sent: Friday, November 13, 2015 1:36 PM To: Steve Gaarder Cc: SCIENTIFIC-LINUX-USERS@FNAL.GOV Subject: Re: Filesystem package messes with /usr/local On Fri, Nov 13, 2015 at 7:28 AM, Nico Kadel-Garcia <nka...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Thu, Oct 29, 2015 at 2:17 PM, Steve Gaarder <gaar...@math.cornell.edu> > wrote: >> I always thought that /usr/local was defined to be an area left alone by the >> operating system. For many years, we have made it a symlink to a read-only >> directory in AFS space. This has worked fine - until now. When I tried to >> update the "filesystem" package, it failed because it tried to do chmods on >> (at least) /usr/local/bin and /usr/local/etc. Why is it doing this? Is >> /usr/local no longer truly local? Sorry, that was my own fault, Now I have my coffee. The /usr/local/ directories are part of the File System Hierarchy, at http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#USRLOCALLOCALHIERARCHY The particular stanza you want to review is below: Requirements The following directories, or symbolic links to directories, must be in /usr/local DirectoryDescription bin Local binaries etc Host-specific system configuration for local binaries games Local game binaries include Local C header files etc., etc. So, yes, it looks like upstream is following the File System Hierarchy. To play nicely with it, you should ideally, replace the subdirectories in /usr/local/ with individual symlinks. And you've my sympathies: I just spent some work dealing with systems where someone had replaced "/opt" with a symlink to "/usr/local" and not documented why anywhere, and seriously broke new software that expected the SELinux privileges it had set for commercial software in "/opt" to be useable.
