Re: [Cooker] /usr/local and /opt
On Sat, 2001-12-22 at 21:06, George Mitchell wrote: I can only tell you how we used them with Unix. We would put our local stuff in /usr/local and third party vendors would put there stuff in /opt. But in reality, who knows? They are just two different places to put stuff that doesn't come with the system. Some distributors like To quote the FHS 2.0 doc: /opt - Reserved for the installation of add-on application software packages. (ie: StarOffice) /usr/local - The /usr/local hierarchy is for use by system admins when installing software locally. It may be used for programs and data that are shareable amongst a group of hosts, but not found in /usr. Typically, /usr/local will be empty after the initial install of a FHS compliant system and will remain safe from being over-written in the event of a base system upgrade. The FHS standard can be obtained (text, postcript and dvi formats) at : http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/fhs/ or you can read it online at http://paradigm.uor.edu/linux/standard/ /usr/local and /opt are both a somewhat gray area in their implentation in that most distro's don't get their implementation quite right. Read the standard, check out a few distro's and you'll see what I mean. Hope it helps, Drew.
Re: [Cooker] /usr/local and /opt
George Mitchell wrote: Just don't suggest this to the people who either write their own stuff or add a lot of semi-customized stuff from other distros and stuff like that. Hello George, what is the difference between /opt and /usr/local? Regards, Helge
Re: [Cooker] /usr/local and /opt
Helge Hielscher wrote: George Mitchell wrote: Just don't suggest this to the people who either write their own stuff or add a lot of semi-customized stuff from other distros and stuff like that. Hello George, what is the difference between /opt and /usr/local? Regards, Helge I can only tell you how we used them with Unix. We would put our local stuff in /usr/local and third party vendors would put there stuff in /opt. But in reality, who knows? They are just two different places to put stuff that doesn't come with the system. Some distributors like SuSE prefer to put some of their actual system stuff in /opt, like KDE and Gnome. And I guess the rational behind that is that KDE and Gnome, etc. are sort of third party software. But that could cover a whole lot of territory. One thing that is clear to me is that everytime someone finds a solution by moving something to a different part of the directory tree, another problem tends to emerge. Everything has its price. To me the big thing is being able to keep separate the software I add on from other sources so that when I reload for whatever reason I don't have to 'reinvent the wheel'. I even keep a number of applications in my home directory as well for this very reason, but you can't do that with every application, some just 'prefer' to be in user local or opt. -George
