Re: Installation-issues

[Jan Ekholm <chakie@infa.abo.fi>]

On Fri, 11 Dec 1998, Adrian Ratnapala wrote:

>yOn Wed, 9 Dec 1998, Christian Reiniger wrote:
>
>> Uh, I don't like the idea of /opt/bin etc. After all that's what /usr/local
>> is for IIRC...
>
>Exactly.

Well, according to 'Linux File Hierarchy Standard' /opt can be used for
custom packages. Do a search on AltaVista with the keywords '+FHS +linux'
and you'll fins it. The old FSSTND did not metntion /opt AFAIK, but this
new one does. I think this means that /usr/local is reserved for stuff
that's crafted at the local site, and not in common use, while /opt can be
used for selfcontained packages. But this does really not matter at all.

>> Yep, but don't rely only on rpm. Some people (like me) prefer to install
>> (almost) everything from source and thus have to remove the stuff by hand.
>> Deleting a dir in /opt and after that the stale symlinks in /usr/local/* is
>> easy.
>> 
>Besides if you use rpm properly, you can just install straign
>to /usr (in fact you should).   You only need to worry about
>"hand made" installs.

Yep, in order to build an RPM I still have to have a normal 'make install'
in my sources that work ok. 'rpm' just picks the files from all around the
filesystem into the foo.rpm -file after 'make install' has benn executed.
This means that if I have a working bin/src-RPM then I also have a working
tar.gz. I plan on using all three of them.

All RPM:s (almost) seem to use /usr, /etc for all stuff, or generally
dropping stuff over /, instead of using /usr/local or /opt.


------------------------+-------------------------------------------------
  Jan 'Chakie' Ekholm   |  CS at Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland 
 Linux Inside since '94 |      chakie@infa.abo.fi, jekholm@abo.fi