Where to install stuff [WAS: Question of the day -- helpful for n ewbies?]

[Duston, Hal]

IMHO, any package that does that withOUT using your 
distribution's package management system is broken.  
When doing upgrades of things shipped _by_ your 
distribution, it needs to have a _complete_ picture 
in whatever database it maintains of what is(n't) 
installed.  Things that go into /usr, /etc, and so 
forth, break this assumption possibly causing your 
later upgrades to break other things.

Hal Duston
hald at sound.net
hdusto01 at sprintspectrum.com

-- Attributions fixed, and text reformatted. --
Jonathan Hutchins <hutchins at therune.com> wrote:
> Mike Coleman <mkc at mathdogs.com> wrote:
> > Hal Duston <hdusto01 at sprintspectrum.com> wrote:
> > > My understanding is that you should put things 
> > > you are adding to your system in /usr/local.
> 
> > I second that.  I unroll source tarballs in 
> > /usr/local/src, and install the results in 
> > /usr/local/{bin,lib,etc}, etc.  For the occasional 
> > binary tarball that wants to be installed in a 
> > single place, I usually put it in 
> > /usr/local/<package>.
> 
> But aren't there some packages that want to install 
> to specific parts of the tree, that require certain 
> pathnames?  Something I played with a short while 
> ago seemed to do that.  Of course, I tend to be 
> twiddling with system software as opposed to 
> end-user stuff.