On 02/23/2012 10:23 AM, Darrell Anderson wrote: >>> trinity is not software locally installed by the local >> system admin? >> >> Right now it is - but very soon it will be installed from >> mirrors, via >> the package manager; users are expecting /usr/local to be >> stuff installed by them not the package manager > /usr/local is for the user. What users want to do with their /usr/local is for them to decide. > > Upstream maintainers are not supposed to install anything in /usr/local. When software is provided by upstream providers as part of a distribution's package system, then /usr/local is supposed to be off limits. Installing to /usr is preferred, but the appropriate installation location for non-standard packages that can't be installed in /usr is /opt. This guideline applies to distro maintainers and upstream providers, not the end user. > > Anybody packaging Trinity for self-use can install to /usr/local. The moment those packages are provided for others then /usr/local is inappropriate. > > Anyone building the Trinity packages for personal use only can install to /usr/local if desired. Start packaging for other users and /usr/local becomes inappropriate. This is just until all the conflicts are hammered out? After that all of this is mute point. Again I use /usr/local so that I can move it to /usr very easily, ever try cp -var /opt/tde into /usr? rsync -var or cp -var /usr/local /usr works every time. Everthing goes where it should. > > For myself I don't install any upstream provided packages in /usr/local because I use /usr/local for things I create on my own. I keep /usr/local on a separate partition, which keeps that file system separate from everything else. That is, /usr/local is mine and I do what I want there. I have partitions that I mount to /usr/local.... working, wip, broken a little, broken somewhat and very broken. I also mount 3.5.10 when I need to and mount 3.5.12 when I working on it. If say tde is broken I can just not mount it for the user till I get it fixed then remount it. Also if I need to try something out I can mount the "in test" partition and if it don't work just mount the partition that works to /usr/local. I build Trinity to install in /opt/trinity because I build my packages usable by other users with the same distro. If the upstream distro I use did not include KDE4 then I would build to install to /usr. If I was creating my own custom distro I would build to install in /usr because I would not include KDE4. I do both....upstream distro, users with KDE4 and users without KDE4 and tde installed. Then the only difference is /usr/local to /usr is just a cp away.