On Wed, 15 Oct 2003, Chris Gehlker wrote:

> 1)	A place for programs that Apple manages. Software Update will
> happily stomp all over this.
> 2)	Another place for stuff you compile yourself.
> 3)	A third place were apt-get puts programs

Is the Debian build process good enough to allow changing the prefix of
where things are installed (including documentation)?

Not all software understands the ./configure --prefix, so sometimes
patches are needed to make sure hard-coded paths are fixed.

> 4)	Yet another place where ordinary users are encouraged to install
> programs by drag-and-drop.
> 5)	Some overlap between 1 and 4

Also, what about configuration directories?

Can you have seperate /etc, /usr/pkg/etc, /usr/local/etc (however they are
named) configuration directories and choose to consolidate if needed?

With pkgsrc, configurations files are defined. By default they install to
an examples directory and if don't exist are copied to the real
configuration directory. (Copying into place can be turned off too.) If it
is not copied into place, because a file already exists, then it will tell
you. Also, on deinstall the two files are compared and if different then
the real (or edited) config file is not removed. The final location for
configurations can be defined pkgsrc-wide -- like you can choose to have
all configurations installed to /home/joe/etc. The important key is that
all the software that is built is trained to know that /home/joe/etc/.

Some admins run pkgsrc on FreeBSD boxes and so they do have three complete
software environments (The core FreeBSD, /usr/local for ports, and
/usr/pkg for pkgsrc installations).

Also, I use pkgsrc on some machines as a regular (non-root) user. So I can
have a fourth location for software installations (like /home/reed/pkg/).

> Now that can make your head ache at first but you soon learn that with
> a few symlinks and some judicious manipulation of your PATH you get
> very fine control. You can change the personality of your machine just
> by swapping .zshrc files.
>
> Now my ideal Linux setup would follow the original Unix model and only
> put programs absolutely essential to operation of the machine in places
> like /bin or /sbin. Everything else would go under /usr/local/compiled
> or /usr/local/apt-gotten depending.
>
> Actual Linux is not that far from the ideal.

Is there a distro called "Actual Linux". I searched. I did find an old
"Linux Actual".

I don't think Gentoo allows it to be installed in multiple places (with
clearly separate config files), such as for different users. Does anyone
know?

   Jeremy C. Reed
   http://bsd.reedmedia.net/