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IMO the idea of installing some stuff in /usr/ and some other stuff in
/usr/local/ is wrong.  I will talk about this from a Linux-specific
viewpoint, but some of what I say applies to other Unixalikes.

The Linux convention is that /usr/local/ is for software not handled by
the package manager.  So if you grab a source tarball and do 'make
install', it will go into /usr/local/.  However if you found an RPM
package of that same software, it should be installed in /usr/.

Now Perl has its own concept of 'site install' but this is not quite the
same.  I think that Perl's site_perl/ directory is used for any module
which wasn't included with the perl5 source tarball.  This is often, but
not necessarily equivalent to that module being installed from a .tar.gz
rather than from an RPM or similar package format.

I think that to be FHS-compliant, MakeMaker should always install in
/usr/local/ by default.  OTOH, to be Perl-compliant you could argue that
things should go into /usr/.  I don't agree with that latter choice, I
think the system conventions should take precedence, but I will say that
files from a single 'make install' should *never* be installed in a
mixture of /usr/ and /usr/local/.  That is just too confusing.

When using MakeMaker to build an RPM package (or its moral equivalent)
then the build script will set PREFIX=/usr and things ought to work.
The package would probably install things in
/usr/lib/perl5/.../site_perl/, reflecting the fact that it is handled by
the package manager (it's in /usr/ not /usr/local/) but as far as Perl
is concerned it counts as a site-specific addition to the ordinary perl5
installation (it's in a directory site_perl/).

- -- 
Ed Avis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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