[fhs-discuss] on the /*/local/ hierarchies

Christoph Anton Mitterer calestyo at scientia.net
Sat May 14 15:52:23 PDT 2011


Hi.


1) One idea that could be discussed (although it's very unlikely that this
is accepted) is, whether all of the current "/*/local*" directories are
moved to it's own hierarchy below "/local".
So on would have e.g.:
/local/bin
/local/sbin
/local/usr
/local/etc
/local/var
(and their typical sub-hierarchies).

I'm not claiming that this is necessarily better that the current schema,
especially when one wants to mount some of them read-only, or e.g. keep all
var-data in one filesystem.
But it would have the advantage, that all local stuff is clearly sorted in
its own hierarchy.

Of course I know, that this is probably difficult to get accepted.


2) The current "definition" of the "/*/local" hierarchies is quite strange
(IMHO):
"The /usr/local hierarchy is for use by the system administrator when
installing software locally."

"locally" can have many meanings: "local on disk", "on a locally exported
network filesystem", etc. etc.

Quite often it is simply used like this:
- any manually installed software goes to the /*/local/ hierarchies.
- any software that is package managed does not.

I'd like to see it defined this way.


3) May I suggest to add "/etc/local".

This should be analogous to the already specified directories:
/usr/local/*
/var/local
which are intended to contain any locally installed software (which is
typically software that is not part of package management).

"/etc/local" would contain the system wide configuration of any locally
installed software.


4) "/opt/local" would be not directly related to the other directories
mentioned above.
The usage of "/opt" itself is rather fuzzy, and most distributions do to
not install any software/packages there at all.
One could argue, that anything that goes to "/opt" is somewhat local
anyway,... but it's not necessarily not-packaged.

So I'd at least reserve the usage of "/opt/local" for "local usage".



Cheers,
Chris.


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