From: wjin@cs.uh.edu (W. Woody Jin) Subject: Re: All this /usr/local flamage Date: Sat, 26 Sep 1992 02:03:30 GMT
In article <1992Sep22.010339.4598@athena.mit.edu> tytso@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Theodore Ts'o) writes:
>Sigh.... I've watched all of this flamge occur on the linux-standards
>list a couple of months ago..... perhaps now people will understand why
>the Linux standards list has mostly died.... :-)
Sigh... Me too.
>For people who are interested, you can read the whole, sordid discussion
>by FTP'ing the file /pub/linux/mirrors/linux-standards/mail-archives.
>
>For those of you who were interested, the following opinion was finally
>reached: The original purpose of /usr/local was a place where users
>could put programs THAT WERE NOT ORIGINALLY PROVIDED BY THE OS.
>/usr/local is a place for individual system administrators to install
>programs such that they won't get nuked by an update.
>
>Given this rationale, it is not surprising that many programs (such as
>many of the GNU utilities, TeX, Perl, etc.) are often installed in
>/usr/local, since they are usually supplied in source form and compiled
>and installed by individual system administrators. However, if a binary
>is being offered as part of a complete release, as part of an "OS
>Release", they should not be installed in /usr/local, since /usr/local
>should be reserved exclusively for site-local programs. There is
>precedence for this;
Please note : TeX, and such stuffs should NOT be OS standard release.
If you really want to distribute them as standard package with OS,
you should still put them in /usr/local !
Why ?
For example, in case of TeX, you still need to install LOTS of other
TeX-related, locally needed files/fonts/programs.
Examples are: various styles, fonts(meta, tfm, pk, virtual),
and many other tex unitility programs like texwipe, detex, printbib,
....etc. In our case, such added stuffs are much bigger than the original
TeX distribution, and users cannot live without the added stuffs.
There is no reason these should be in /usr and there is no reason
these should be in other directory than /some_prefix/tex.
Same is true for X and GNU stuffs also.
Please do not make Linux look like MS-DOS !!!
> - Ted
-- ____ ____ ____ ____________________________________ (___) _________________ | | | | | | W. Woody Jin (wjin@cs.uh.edu) (o o) Moo.... | | | |__| | PhD Student. Research Asst. o=======\ / I'm a Cow Lover. | | | | Dept. of Computer Science / | ||O My wife was born \ |---| |--| | University of Houston ` ||'---|| in Cow year. Mooo \____/|__| |__| _______________________________^^ ^^_____________________