Re: need opinions from sysadmins on where reiser4progs should install

[prj@po.cwru.edu (Paul Jarc)]

Hans Reiser <reiser@namesys.com> wrote:
> Clifford Beshers wrote:
>> http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#SBINSYSTEMBINARIES
>
> well, this says /sbin as I read it.  Thanks for the URL Clifford!

The FHS doesn't specify what the default installation prefix for a
source tarball should be.  That section says that distributions should
install certain things in /sbin or /usr/sbin, and that admins who
install similar things independently of the distribution should use
/usr/local/sbin.  Obviously that doesn't work in some cases, but that
is what the FHS says: distributions and admins should choose those
respective locations, regardless of the package's default.

Since distributions' installations are typically automated and so can
easily specify a non-default prefix, source tarballs generally default
to /usr/local for the admins.  As a result, admins will expect the
default to be /usr/local, and they know how to use --prefix=/ if
that's what they want.  The principles of least surprise and least
damage suggest that the default for reiser4progs should be /usr/local,
just like every other package, *even if that means the default will
rarely be used*.

For myself, I only care that an explicit --prefix is used for every
installed file, since I install to a different directory anyway.


paul