About /usr, /usr/local, and anything

[Rahul Dave]

As a user and system administrator, in that order, here are some observations.
I dont believe LSB ought to be imposing any standardizations, but I would
agree that a lot of the installation process in unixen seems unflexible..
and so I thought I'd list some notions..

o I like to use pre-made RPMS, unless security software is involved, as I
  usually do not have time to go through compiling, and when I do, I always
  create a spec file and a RPM as I do security maintenance through RPM's.

o Personally, I favor large packages going into their own areas, for reasons
  of manageability, and co-existence of multiple versions, particularly
  libraries.

o It bothers me that a lot of programs seem to need to hardcode path 
  information from the autoconf process. I like the jdk approach, where
  you provide a path to java, and it groks the rest, and the KDE approach,
  where KDEDIR and a /etc/ld.so.conf entry set everything up. Such approaches
  would make installation path issues irreleavant.

o The result of the above is that most programs you get from the RHCN install
  into /usr, and are non-relocatable. So much for keeping /usr clean to
  what the manufacturer supplied. Solution, get SRPM, and change prefix.
  So much for pre-estimating sizes of /usr. And RedHat has itself grown /usr
  majorly from 5 to 6, screwing up re-installs.

I wanted to ask, whats the reason for the continuing libc fiasco's, this time
between glibc2.0 and glibc2.1. JDK1.2RC4 from blackdown wants 2.1, and Oracle
8i needs  2.1. It was my impression that the external interface was standardized, is it that someone keeps breaking binary compatibility? I dont understand..

Thanks,
Rahul