From: Green, Simon (SGreen@KRAFTEUROPE.COM)
Date: Thu Jan 16 2003 - 11:22:42 EST
I think that POSIX dictates that /usr/local should be present, but that you
can do what you like with it.
Making it read-only or NFS is not in principal wrong. Compare it with the
situation on a diskless client, where everything is either in memory or NFS
mounted, including /usr.
However, since /usr/local is so widely used by smaller applications it seems
foolish to prevent this; it just makes life difficult for oneself, and
harder for a newcomer to follow what's going on. There is no disadvantage
in installing in /usr/local.
In general, I believe in installing software wherever the supplier suggests.
Life is so much easier when the paths in the manuals are correct. I would
consider changing it if someone was dumb enough to try and install directly
in /, or something like that.
If one wants a tightly controlled NFS mounted directory for scripts and
what-not, then it's a trivial matter to create one with a suitable name.
There's no reason at all to appropriate /usr/local for this purpose.
Simon Green
Philip Morris ITSC Europe
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-----Original Message-----
From: Sheets, Jerald [mailto:JSHeets@OLOLRMC.COM]
Sent: 16 January 2003 15:54
To: aix-l@Princeton.EDU
Subject: Re: Common shared filesystem
Actually,
On most all Unixes (except AIX) /usr/local is the standard for
installed applications. This includes the BSD family of which AIX is a
child.
There was an /opt standard on Solaris for several years primarily
for the reason you cite (export via NFS), but they too have preferred
/usr/local in recent releases. I'm finding also that most if not all
Linuxes are looking to /usr/local as well. This has been specified by the
Linux Standards Base http://www.linuxbase.org <http://www.linuxbase.org>
consisting of more than 25 industry giants including IBM and Oracle.
The reason I say all that is to say this:
Of the sixteen or so third-party *.tar.gz applications I've
installed recently over 4.3.3 or 5L, they have *ALL* been tarballed as an
install to /usr/local. To put them elsewhere (via --prefix) would be to
install them in other their intended directory.
Being a relative newcomer to the AIX crew (in comparison to some of
you folks here--I've got 7 years AIX), I've tended toward obtaining software
from BULL or UCLA just to keep it in the SMIT *.bff packaging scheme.
However, most any other package I've had to install, I've just let the
package dictate it's location (which most often tends toward /usr/local)
What do some of you vets see as the primary downfall of management of
packages over /usr/local rather than other locations, is this prdominantly
an NFS-shared situation, or speaking in general, and what are your
practices?
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