use of /usr/local by packages (again)

[Alvin Thompson]

thanks to all for the informative responses. you are right; the stuff 
under /user/local mostly seems to be placeholder directories.

while i agree that programs can and should look under 
/usr/local/whatever to see if there is any firmware/extensions/other 
stuff that the user added, i'm not so sure i like the idea of the distro 
adding even placeholder directories--it should be up to the admin to 
explicitly add them if needed. one person pointed out that the 
placeholder directory is to tell the user that they can add stuff there. 
i would argue that that's what documentation is for.

i guess if it's the policy that placeholder directories are ok, i'll 
have to live with it, but i don't think it's a good idea. if i (and i 
imagine other admins) have /usr/local on it's own partition, i usually 
mount it read-only. /usr/local is for _my_ stuff; i don't expect 
/usr/local to be written to just because i add a package from the 
distribution. now i'll have to make sure that /usr/local is writable 
whenever i install a package, which can be difficult in some cases (see 
below).

but the biggest problem isn't the placeholders, it's that some programs 
actually store stuff there on their own under /user/local and don't work 
properly if the stuff is not there. to illustrate why this is a problem, 
consider my use case, which i'm sure applies to many admins: i have an 
NFS shared /user/local on my network. when i install a computer on the 
network, i normally configure it so that it mounts the shared directory 
as /usr/local. this way all of the scripts/programs/stuff specific to my 
network is in one place, and i can change it in one place. but now i 
can't do that because it will break programs in this distro.

my (unsolicited) two cents,
alvin