[linux-audio-dev] Tracker

[Billy Biggs]

Benjamin Flaming (lad at solobanjo.com):

> On Friday 28 November 2003 11:54 am, David Olofson wrote:
> > On Friday 28 November 2003 15.07, Stonekeeper wrote:
> 
> [...]
> 
> > However, I think the proper solution is to install things so that
> > you never have dependencies in the wrong direction. It makes some
> > sense that libs in /usr shouldn't depend on /usr/local.
> 
> For the benefit of Linux newcomers like me, could someone explain the
> historical reasons why we even have a /usr/local directory to begin
> with?

  Because in many environments /usr is NFS-shared across a lot of
machines.

  It's really awkward that autoconf-based tools default to /usr/local
since many users of my applications often use it and end up with non-FHS
compliant silly directories like /usr/local/etc and /usr/local/var which
should never exist.  Putting everything under $PREFIX is really a
compromise by the autoconf folks, and using /usr/local seems to be
another compromise partly to help separate GNU stuff from native stuff
(think installing bash on a Solaris machine).

  -Billy