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Re: /usr/local in some packages



On Tue, Sep 29, 1998 at 12:34:09PM -0400, Daniel Martin wrote:
> *sigh* I meant this to go to policy, but I wasn't careful with my
> keypresses in gnus...
> 
> Martin Schulze <joey@tapiola.Infodrom.North.DE> writes:
> 
> > Joseph Carter wrote:
> > > On Tue, Sep 29, 1998 at 12:16:52PM +1000, Herbert Xu wrote:
> > > > After purging emacs today, the damn thing deleted my /usr/local symlink since
> > > > it was the last package to have /usr/local in it.  Obviously this is not very
> > > > clever.
> > > > 
> > > > So we should either remove /usr/local from all packages, or tell dpkg to not
> > > > remove /usr/local.  I personally favour the former solution.
> > > 
> > > /usr/local should not be used in packages.  Thought that was already policy?
> > 
> > Right.  No package may install stuff in /usr/local nor in /opt.  Period.
> > 
> > I guess the only exceptions are perl and emacs where the package
> > should create the directory structure so people won't have to
> > guess them.
> 
> I'm very glad TeX set up its /usr/local directory structure; that I
> _really_ would not want to guess at.  In fact, anything else that
> requires directories in /usr/local should set up the structure; the
> only problem I see is that people may (rightly) wish to mount
> /usr/local read-only, in which case installation of packages that
> create /usr/local directory structures may fail.

Thats a very good point that some local directory structure would
be nice for osme packages but...
here is my solution idea.

Packages must not put ANYTHING in /usr/local (though there are 
a few stub directories which can globally be made at install like
bin, etc, )

Packages which would otherwise make a directory structure in local should 
document it in their doc directory.

Packages MAY include a script which allows the user to make the
diretcory structure on demand.

(this would allow one to at least re-make the directories after a 
"Damn it all!!" rm -rf of the local directories :) )

-Steve

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