On Sep 29, 2016, at 5:47 PM, Paul Eggert <eggert@CS.UCLA.EDU> wrote:
On 09/29/2016 02:15 PM, Brian Inglis wrote:
...
To make life easier for distribution packagers, and admins of systems using distros, which is probably most (rather than assuming individuals installing under the generic TOPDIR=/usr/local, which now should probably be /usr/opt in most cases, and is fine for code) please consider defaulting installation to the standard "TOP" dirs: /etc, /usr/sbin, /usr/share/..., etc. (zic is normally installed in /usr/sbin), and take those variations into consideration in definitions and installation steps.
Is this standard written down anywhere?
I don't understand the suggestion. /usr/local is the standard destination in GNU kits. The reasoning is that people install directly from those kits only when they aren't using the packager's package files. And if so, the whole idea is to make sure such user installs don't conflict with the packager's bits. Packagers know this and know how to override the default destination when they build their packages. And it doesn't make sense for TZ to attempt to do this, because different packagers have different naming tree conventions. This is one of the main things that makes Linux a mess: half of the Linuxes out there put stuff in /usr, and half put it in /opt, for no reason that I know of. paul