Subject: Re: /usr/local (again)

From: [email-masked] (Bruce Perens)
Date: Tue, 3 Sep 96 08:04 PDT

Bruce:
> Let's please not add unnecessary questions in the postinst.
> I think /usr/local should be a symbolic link to /local, but it should
> always exist.

From: Dominik Kubla <[email-masked]>
> We will not gain anything with this! I am sure if you think about it
> you will recognize that this will just shift the problem to a different
> location in the file system.
>
> On all my Linux systems /usr/local is a mount point of a READ-ONLY AFS or
> NFS volume. And we have our own site-wide /usr/local structure which is
> shared by all 12 architectures.  As it stands right now, Debian is not 
> well-behaved in a heterogenous environment.
>
> Please take a short time to consider the arguments of others and credit
> them with some intelligence and experience.

Ouch!

What I object to is another question in the postinst. I installed several
Debian systems last week, and there were too many questions - the effect
was that you could not let the installation run unattended. What's worse,
some maintainers have placed questions in the pre-install script - and
then you get questions all during the installation instead of just at the
end.

So please figure out how to do this with adding a question to every package
that uses files in /usr/local.

	Thanks

	Bruce

---

From: Stuart Lamble <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 04 Sep 96 08:47:50 +1000

[email-masked] (Bruce Perens) wrote:
[snipped]
>then you get questions all during the installation instead of just at the

[...]

Just a suggestion (and probably not a very good one): where a package needs
to ask a question, perhaps it'd be appropriate to have a script
postinst.questions (or some such) which can be run after all the other
packages have been installed and configured? At least that way, all the
questions would bombard you at once, instead of halting installation
halfway through.

By all means, shoot me down in flames if you want to. :-)

(As an incidental aside, the reason I've got a question in the fsp postinst
is that it didn't make a great deal of sense to split fsp into two packages
- fspclient and fspserver, say - when the server is only about 30kB. If
that is wrong, by all means let me know, and I'll correct it; it would be
one way of getting rid of at least one postinst question :-)