Re: /usr -> /usr/local

> Well it's about damn time /usr/local got fixed

One of the reasons we made /usr the default (or rather, why I did, I
remember it being pretty controversial back then), is that I don't
think /usr/local can be "fixed". The idea that /usr is where software
goes has been around a long time and has permeated its way into many
different programs. Finding and fixing them all is a huge job, even
assuming the maintainers want to.

Given the amazing amount of effort it'd take to make /usr/local a
first class citizen alongside /usr, I made the judgement call that it
wasn't worth the effort. The situation hasn't changed, Linux is pretty
much the same as it was five years ago.

If you want to put a lot of effort into this, I'd go back to square
one and try to get it right. The whole idea of having /usr vs
/usr/local is absurd and a textbook example of how not to do namespace
design. Even if everything put into /usr/local was respected tomorrow,
it wouldn't solve the problem of name conflicts. Linux really should
support having two versions of the same program installed at once, but
doesn't, purely due to this piece of UNIX historical baggage. There
are other problems caused by this design, but I'm preaching to the
choir here ;)

Every new OS designed in the past 20 years has ignored this design and
gone its own way. BeOS did it, NeXT did it, MacOS X did it, OLPC Linux
did it. Now mainstream Linux should drop it too.

There were originally two reasons for designing autopackage to use the
FHS, rather than something like Thomas Leonards ZeroInstall:

1) It meant better integration *now* with desktop environments like
GNOME and KDE
2) I thought ZeroInstall was too radical and that something more unixy
like autopackage would be more easily accepted by mainstream distros

(2) turned out to be completely wrong - anything other than the status
quo was too radical, thus invalidating that reason. (1) was still a
good reason, but it would probably have been easier to improve
GNOME/KDE than to simply break everything else to fit UNIX.

Concrete suggestion-wise, take a look at:

http://live.gnome.org/PackagingAbstractionLayer

Are DBUS services still the in-thing? Writing one of them might be a good start.

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