Freeradius-Devel Digest, Vol 18, Issue 3

[Eddie Stassen]

Stephen Gran wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 04, 2006 at 09:01:14AM +0200, Valts Mazurs said:
>> See comments below:
>>
>>> In case no one else decides to chime in here with sanity and reason...
>>> /usr/local is the "right" place for default installation - not only
>>> because it's the right place (and it definitely is), but because that
>>> is where it's been thus far and people have gotten used to it.  If
>>> some third party decides to repackage freeradius to confirm to their
>>> own fly-by-night naming convension, they should be the ones
>>> responsible for apologizing to their userbase and fixing the bugs that
>>> arise as a result of the transition.  Developer time is never well
>>> spent on fixing bugs associated with such useless operations as
>>> renaming config files or moving paths.  Plus, there are plenty of
>>> Solaris, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD boxes out there that very
>>> happily run freeradius out of /usr/local, why force some stupid linux
>>> convention on them?
>> I totally agree with you. Since freeradius is not meant to run only on
>> Linux, sticking to weird linux-only standard would be stupid idea.
> 
> Well, the FHS is not Linux specific.  Much of the add on software for
> the Solaris boxes I admin already puts itself under /opt.  That being
> said, /usr/local is probably the right place for freeradius to default
> to, IMHO.  /opt is for third party applications that are already
> bundled and ready to install (an acroread self-extracting installer or
> something, e.g.).  /usr/local has always been the place for the admin
> to put their own locally compiled software, so it should probably stay
> as the default install path.


For what its worth, 'man filesystem(5)' (on Solaris 9 and 10 at least) advises 
against /usr/local:

/usr/local

          Not part of the  SVR4-based  Solaris  distribution.  The
          /usr  directory is exclusively for software bundled with
          the Solaris operating  system.  If  needed  for  storing
          machine-local  add-on  software,  create  the  directory
          /opt/local  and  make  /usr/local  a  symbolic  link  to
          /opt/local.  The  /opt  directory  or  filesystem is for
          storing add-on software to the system.


Eddie