On a serious note, what I'd change about FreeBSD hier(7)

[Manish Jain]

On 2020-05-13 06:50, Bob Proulx wrote:
> Steve O'Hara-Smith wrote:
>> Ottavio Caruso wrote:
>>> Polytropon wrote:
>>>> FreeBSD's general organisation keeps all non-OS stuff stored
>>>> in /usr/local; the directories owned by the OS have a specific
>>>> purpose which is reflected by their name and location
>>>
>>> I'd pretty much want to have all non-base stuff into somewhere else
>>> than /usr/local.
>>
>> 	Why ? /usr/local is explicitly for non-base stuff so what would go
>> in there ?
> 
> What would go in /usr/local would be locally compiled applications
> that are outside of the base system, outside of the ports system, and
> are purely locally compiled from source programs.  And anything else
> the local admin wanted to put there.
> 
>>> I like NetBSD installing ports in /usr/pkg (or
>>> whenever you want set your $PREFIX to). I'd rather have /usr/local for
>>> my own personal software and avoid it messing up with official ports.
>>
>> 	Why fight the system when you could just have /usr/personal
>> or /site or /opt or something for your own stuff without changing existing
>> conventions.
> 
> FreeBSD is the odd one out here in using /usr/local for system uses.
> In other systems, and I grew up on HP-UX, SunOS, old BSD, and so
> forth, have always reserved /usr/local for the local admin to
> populate.
> 
> Using most from-source software the default install location is most
> typically /usr/local and therefore out of the box unless you fight
> with the upstream source locations (fighting with upstream really
> means overriding the default, I only said fighting because you did)
> then "make install" will typically install to /usr/local, potentially
> overwriting components from FreeBSD.
> 
> Therefore on FreeBSD I use /local for those things.  Which is
> defensible as perhaps being a better location.  However to avoid
> potentially overwriting something in /usr/local I must reconfigure
> upstream source to avoid it each and every time.
> 
> Bob

Perhaps you might like to remember another location : /opt

That is entirely unused in the default config in FreeBSD, and I think 
/opt/bin makes a good location for the user's own software.


Regards,
Manish Jain