/usr/local/bin in $PATH in system scripts?

[Fergal Daly]

Hi,

I'm looking for clarification of policy in the context of this bug

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-system-tools/+bug/71336

and the fact that having your own version of Perl in /usr/local will
almost certainly break your Ubuntu admin tools.

I have always assumed that it was safe to put whatever I like in
/usr/local/ and my system will continue to work. This seems to be
backed up by Debian policy

http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-opersys.html#s-sysvinit

which contains this paragraph

"However, because /usr/local and its contents are for exclusive use of
the local administrator, a package must not rely on the presence or
absence of files or directories in /usr/local for normal operation."

This seems quite sensible, otherwise it leads to mysterious and hard
to track-down failures.

Is this ubuntu policy too?

I can't see any real benefit to including /usr/local/bin and I can
find plenty of people in the forums who can't start *-admin,
presumably due to problems similar to mine,

F