Re: /usr/local is loved by Debian Python people?
Thank you guys for reference to FHS. I did read it long ago and now
glanced over again to confirm my knowledge.
Actually, since FHS does not say anything about ownership of the files in FH,
so Debian exploits that in its own way:
$> ls -ld /usr /usr/local
0 drwxr-xr-x 15 root root 440 2008-02-17 14:56 /usr/
0 drwxrwsr-x 10 root staff 272 2006-11-03 15:49 /usr/local/
and that is due to Debian policy (9.1.2).
Unfortunately I can't find clear description of the 'staff' group destiny
nowhere in Debian documentation (ie policy or dev-ref), but clearly there is
now difference between pure Administrator role (ie root) and possibly a
larger group of users in 'staff' system group.
What I know though, that in real-world situations, users who need to test their
software by installing under '/local' are added to 'staff' group by the
Administrator (sure thing, most of the time it is the same 'real' person ;)).
That makes it easy to 'locally' customize the system, and I take it as an
advantage. That way Python developers install needed eggs and custom
versions of python. And that is what actually then drives them and other users
of the system into the madness -- that now /usr/local-installed things
interfere with functioning of components installed properly by system
administrator under /usr/(non-local). And that there is no transparent way to
adjust such setup.
If in the case of shells, presence of /usr/local paths in the PATH is easy to
configure due to present configuration files (as I mentioned before), also in
the case of libraries, it is easily configurable via modification of
/etc/ld.so.conf.d/libc.conf, in Python's case, there is NO way to have it
configured in the desired way -- ie not to have /usr/local components loaded
automagically. And that is the problem.
On Mon, 02 Feb 2009, Guy Hulbert wrote:
> I think you will find the answer here:
> http://www.pathname.com/fhs/
On Tue, 03 Feb 2009, Sebastian Rittau wrote:
> I think you misunderstand the purpose of /usr/local. It is not a place for
> users to put stuff only they need. It can't be, because /usr/local is
> not writeable by ordinary user, but just by the system administrator.
> /usr/local is the place for the system administrator to manually install
> programs, libraries, and other stuff not tracked by Debian's packaging
> system. As such it is assumed that the system administrator does know
> what he's doing and Debian won't second-guess him and let those things
> in /usr/local take precedence.
--
Yaroslav Halchenko
Research Assistant, Psychology Department, Rutgers-Newark
Student Ph.D. @ CS Dept. NJIT
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