Re: /usr/local

[Santiago Vila Doncel <sanvila@unex.es>]

On Tue, 22 Sep 1998, Paulo J. da Silva e Silva wrote:

> I would like to ask a question. I noticed that some important packages in Hamm
> (Latex and Emacs, for example) write in /usr/local during installation (at
> least they create directories there).
> 
> Well, our local system administrator is having problem with this. It has
> decided to mount /usr/local using nfs as read only (then you would have an
> unique copy of /usr/local in all machines). When he tries to install any
> package that writes in /usr/local it aborts installation.

Trying to write to /usr/local is not a problem. The problem is when a
package tries to write to /usr/local and it exits with an error status.
It is Debian policy that this should not happen.

For example, emacs19.postinst says:

for dir in /usr/local/share/emacs/19.34/site-lisp; do
  test -d $dir || mkdir -p $dir && true
done

The "true" part makes sure that if /usr/local is read-only, this will
not produce an error even if it fails.

If you find any package which fails because of not using this or some
other equivalent trick, please report it as a bug.

Thanks.