[pacman-dev] use of /usr/local with pacman

[Jeff]

On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 08:34:18AM +0200, Xavier wrote:
> 
> I am confused. Are you talking about the package manager pacman, or
> about the package themselves?

Sorry for the really late reply. Technically, I'm talking about makepkg.
To rephrase, I was asking if pacman (or makepkg) has a policy disallowing
installation to /usr/local or if it would install anywhere the PKGBUILD
was written for. Allan McRae answered that it was up to the PKGBUILD.
The question was prompted by the 3.3 release which added /usr/local to
the {DOC,MAN}_DIRS. Of course I completely missed that /usr/local was
already specified in STRIP_DIRS prior to 3.3. I skimmed through the diff
too quickly! ;)

> What you mention with '/usr/local' is just a autoconf default :
> http://sunsite.ualberta.ca/Documentation/Gnu/autoconf-2.13/html_node/autoconf_19.html

To be more precise, /usr/local is not the standard because of autoconf.
autoconf uses /usr/local as the default because the standard already
existed in various flavors of UNIX.

> And when you build and install any software manually, without using
> the official package manager, it should be seen as a local
> modification. So it is good to have the build system use /usr/local by
> default.

If by build system you mean manual compiling, I agree completely. Going
one step further, though, the argument could be made that a package
manager should not even be able to install to the local prefix because
the package manager belongs to the realm of system packages not local
packages, but don't mistake this as me asking for such a "feature". :)

BTW, I don't recall which devs added the splitpkg functionality, but I
LOVE it! Thanks a million!

-- 
Jeff

My other computer is an abacus.