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Re: /usr/local in some packages



On Tue, Sep 29, 1998 at 12:34:09PM -0400, Daniel Martin wrote:
> 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.

Why? You can easily guess from looking in the config files for TeX and
/usr. The thing which is NOT obvious is that you have to run texhash
afterwards (IIRC the default is set up to require this for /usr/local;
it shouldn't).

> Another solution:
> Packages may not contain any /usr/local directory structure, but may
> create it in postinst.  If so, they must remove it in (pre|post)rm.
> Something like this: (for emacs)
> #in postinst
> set +e
> mkdir -p /usr/local/lib/emacs/site-lisp/
> set -e
> 
> #in prerm
> set +e
> rmdir -p /usr/local/lib/emacs/site-lisp/ /usr/local/lib/emacs/
> set -e

Why bother removing it? The casual user will probably loose a total max.
of 20-30 inodes - not many. And removing it is rather silly. /usr/local
is for local sysadmins - they can remove the unused directories themselves.
In fact, instead of creating the directories, we could just put hints in
/usr/doc (but I don't think that's good, because many people dont RTFM).

In fact, I think I just described current policy.

-- 
Tom Lees <tom@lpsg.demon.co.uk> <tom@debian.org>  http://www.lpsg.demon.co.uk/
PGP Key: finger tom@master.debian.org, http://www.lpsg.demon.co.uk/pgpkeys.asc.


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