Venting my frustration with FreeBSD

[Freddie Cash]

On Monday 04 December 2006 03:31 pm, Nicole wrote:
> --- Josh Paetzel <josh at tcbug.org> wrote:
>  5) My personal Pet Peeve. I miss, when apache (as an example) would
> get installed in /usr/local/apache. And all its configs and includes
> were there with it. Much like the /opt concept. If its not part of the
> OS, keep it seperate! There are so many ports I cannot use becouse it
> makes tracking updates and such across many servers much more
> difficult.

I like the FreeBSD filesystem hierarchy.  It makes a lot more sense to me 
than the hodge-podge created by installing an app (including config 
files) into /path/to/app-name or the Linux method of "everything 
under /usr, all configs under /etc).

The OS is installed to / and /usr, with OS config files under /etc.
3rd-party apps (ie ports) are installed under /usr/local with config files 
under /usr/local/etc.

Gives a nice delineation between the OS and installed apps.

Something I can't stand on Linux systems is that there is no concept of 
a "base OS" separate from "installed apps".  Everything is a mish-mash 
under /usr and /etc.  And don't get me started on the mess that is /var.

I've tried reading through the Linux Filesystem Hierarchy Standard several 
times, and each time I've come away from it wondering how anyone could 
follow it.  There's enough wiggle room in it that two distros could be 
FHS-compliant without any commonalities in the filesystem layouts.

hier(7) on FreeBSD is not perfect, but it makes sense, and it's easy to 
read, and it's logical.

For me, the only time it makes sense to put an entire app (including 
config and log files) into its own separate directory, is when manually 
installing from source (by-passing any package management tools the OS 
ships with).  We do this quite often on RedHat systems as building RPMs 
from scratch is nobody's idea of fun.

-- 
Freddie Cash
fcash at ocis.net