/opt is missing

[Alan McKinnon]

On Thu, 2006-08-17 at 16:49 -0500, Christofer C. Bell wrote:
> On 8/17/06, Alexander Skwar <listen at alexander.skwar.name> wrote:
> >
> > Well, well, well - in how far is acrobat7 more "optional" than,
> > lets say, KDE for *Ubuntu*, ie. not Kubuntu?
> 
> Insofar as acrobat7, installed from Adobe's site, is not part of the
> "Ubuntu operating system" it's an optionally installed package that
> can live happily in /opt.  Ubuntu does not supply software (other than
> the previously mentioned LTSP client directories) that lives in /opt,
> while many vendors (most notably Sun) do.
> 
> On an Ubuntu system, /opt is more or less going to look like a
> "/usr/local for larger packages".  Instead of creating a
> /usr/local/java, for example, you can use /opt/java instead.  Instead
> of /usr/local/povray, you can use /opt/povray.
> 
> If you were to install KDE (a very large software package) on an
> Ubuntu system, while at the same time eschewing the normal package
> management tools for doing so, then /opt/kde would be a logical place
> to put it.

It turns out I slightly misread enopepsoo's original question - he did
ask what IN UBUNTU uses /opt. So Chris is right, as very little in
Ubuntu ends up going in /opt

Everything in mine is third party apps separately downloaded and
installed using it's own installer - something like InstallShield.

My reading of the FHS is:

regular apps fully supported by the distro are installed in /bin, /sbin
or /usr.
/usr/local is a good place for stuff you compile/build yourself - which
is why the majority of projects using autotools have --prefix=/usr/local
/opt is a good place for pre-compiled binaries from 3rd party vendors
that are independant from the package manager.

Some distros seem to take the view that /opt is for anything that is
optional i.e. not installed by default with the base system. SuSE does
this with KDE IIRC.

alan