use of /usr/local by packages (again)

[Alvin Thompson]

no comments on this from anybody who knows about/is in charge of this 
stuff? should i submit a bug?

-alvin


Alvin Thompson wrote:
> 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
>