28 Nov
2003
28 Nov
'03
2:40 p.m.
Benjamin Flaming (lad(a)solobanjo.com):
On Friday 28 November 2003 11:54 am, David Olofson
wrote:
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
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?