Benjamin Flaming ([EMAIL PROTECTED]): > On Friday 28 November 2003 11:54 am, David Olofson wrote: > > On Friday 28 November 2003 15.07, Stonekeeper wrote: > > [...] > > > However, I think the proper solution is to install things so that > > you never have dependencies in the wrong direction. It makes some > > sense that libs in /usr shouldn't depend on /usr/local. > > For the benefit of Linux newcomers like me, could someone explain the > historical reasons why we even have a /usr/local directory to begin > with?
Because in many environments /usr is NFS-shared across a lot of machines. It's really awkward that autoconf-based tools default to /usr/local since many users of my applications often use it and end up with non-FHS compliant silly directories like /usr/local/etc and /usr/local/var which should never exist. Putting everything under $PREFIX is really a compromise by the autoconf folks, and using /usr/local seems to be another compromise partly to help separate GNU stuff from native stuff (think installing bash on a Solaris machine). -Billy
