Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Mon, 11 Dec 2000 12:58:21 +1100
From:      "Andrew Reilly" <areilly@bigpond.net.au>
To:        Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org>
Cc:        current@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Confusing error messages from shell image activation
Message-ID:  <20001211125820.A16115@gurney.reilly.home>
In-Reply-To: <14899.52206.955003.130371@guru.mired.org>; from mwm@mired.org on Sun, Dec 10, 2000 at 12:31:10PM -0600
References:  <14898.33404.356173.963351@guru.mired.org> <14898.31393.228926.763711@guru.mired.org> <Pine.BSF.4.21.0012091347030.88984-100000@turtle.looksharp.net> <200012100904.CAA27546@harmony.village.org> <3A336781.94E1646@newsguy.com> <14899.41809.754369.259894@guru.mired.org> <200012101557.KAA29588@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu> <14899.43958.622675.847234@guru.mired.org> <uoc66ksnqsk.fsf@hurlame.pdl.cs.cmu.edu> <14899.52206.955003.130371@guru.mired.org>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Sun, Dec 10, 2000 at 12:31:10PM -0600, Mike Meyer wrote:
> Not /usr/local - that's for locally maintained software. I'd rather it
> go on /usr, so I don't like /opt. When I got to choose, I chose
> /usr/opt. But anything other than /usr/local on /usr would do as well.

So do you also put the configurations in ${PREFIX}/etc, or
/usr/local/etc?  Even though you got them from a readily
replaceable source, you can't retrieve your local configurations
that way.

> That's true. But if it's packaged, it belongs in an area reserved for
> *packages*. FreeBSD is the only system I know of that coopts
> /usr/local for packages, instead of reserving it for things that are
> locally maintained.  Whether that locally maintained software is
> written locally or comes from a third party is irrelevant to this
> discussion.

Well, I'll just stick my oar in for /usr/local.  I count myself
among the aesthetically dismayed when I first encountered /opt
on a SunOS box.  (Or was that Solaris?  Time fades...)

> The critical difference is the "requires local src configuration"
> line. For FreeBSD or any of the ports or packages, I can blow away the
> source tree without worrying about needing it back; I can always get
> it back from FreeBSD again. For the same reason, I don't worry much
> about the binaries.  For locally written software, if I lose ths
> source, I'm SOL.

Don't you keep the source that you write somewhere in your home
directory?  I do.

> For true third party software, how screwed I am
> depends on how hard it was getting the thing to build on FreeBSD. As a
> general rule, I always save them. The binaries get the same
> treatment. Having to figure out which is which is *much* easier if the
> two are in different directory hierarchies.

Whenever I have to build something outside the ports hierarchy,
I finish by diffing the orig and modified source trees.  I put
the source tarball into /usr/ports/distfiles, in case someone at
FreeBSD gets around to building a port of it, and stick the
diffs in my $HOME/src directory.

> Clearly, a package is *not* the same as either third party or locally
> written software. For people who don't care about any of those
> differences, packages co-opting /usr/local doesn't matter. For people
> who do, there's PREFIX - except it doesn't work very well, and can't
> work for binary builds (and with the CDROM set no longer having
> distfiles on it, that's a major PITA).

I agree that PREFIX/LOCALBASE should work: you can't legislate
taste.  I'm going to keep it to /usr/local and /usr/X11R6,
though, thanks all the same.

-- 
Andrew


To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20001211125820.A16115>