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Re: profile and /usr/local/bin in PATH



On Tue, 27 Nov 2001, Jules Bean wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 27, 2001 at 01:48:14PM -0500, Dale Scheetz wrote:
> > The default profile on a Debian system puts '/usr/local/bin' as the first
> > element in the PATH list. This causes several things to not work as
> > desired.
> 
> And there are good reasons why that makes sense.  The typical
> situation is that some binary in the distribution doesn't behave in
> exactly the way the syasadmin wants, so the sysadmin can override it
> with a local binary (or script) in /us/rlocal.

Or: dpkg --purge <package> so that the /usr/local version will work ;-)

Clearly this is a "mindset" issue, and as usual my mind works backwards
from most folks...

> 
> I'm not saying that the situations you describe don't also make sense,
> by the way ;-) In my rather limited expereience, having /usr/local
> first is mor useful, though.

Depends on what you are using it for ;-)

> 
> > In order to make this work as expected, I would like to put /usr/local/bin
> > at the end of the path list. Can anyone suggest a compelling reason why I
> > shouldn't do this? Is there any Debian "feature" that depends upon this
> > path structure?
> 
> I can't think of anything off-hand which depends upon it: after all
> the distribution leaves /usr/local alone.

Yea, right ;-)

> 
> However, I would be inclined not to move /usr/local's position in
> $PATH.  Rather, I'd suggest a new hierarchy /usr/localfb (fb ==
> fallback) which goes last in the path, to complement /usr/local which
> goes first.

Yuck...

> 
> YMMV.

Seems to ;-)

Luck,

Dwarf
--
_-_-_-_-_-   Author of "Dwarf's Guide to Debian GNU/Linux"  _-_-_-_-_-_-
_-                                                                    _-
_- aka   Dale Scheetz                   Phone:   1 (850) 656-9769     _-
_-       Flexible Software              11000 McCrackin Road          _-
_-       e-mail:  dwarf@polaris.net     Tallahassee, FL  32308        _-
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