Question about the installation directory of programs

[John Spencer]

Laurent Bercot wrote:

>  Nowadays, the only systems that actually make a real distinction 
> between / and /usr
> are, ironically, the BSDs, where /bin binaries are statically linked to 
> provide a
> failsafe recovery system. GNU certainly can't do that. Alternative libc 
> Linux users
> could, but AFAIK nobody bothers; people who like static linking link 
> *everything*
> statically.

not necessarily. i like static linking, but sabotage linux links only 
core components statically, because it just makes no sense for 
full-blown desktop apps with dozens of dependencies, you'll end up with 
huge binaries, and some stuff simply can't be linked statically due to 
"modular" plugin design.

> 
>  It doesn't really matter where you place your binaries. Executing a 
> binary should
> be done with PATH search anyway, and PATH will always contain /usr/bin 
> and /bin at
> least. If it bothers you, there's a busybox configuration option to 
> entirely forget
> about /usr, which is the cleaner and IMHO sensible choice.
> 
>  The only case where this matters is when you have to provide absolute 
> pathnames,
> for instance in shebang lines. #!/bin/sh, but #!/usr/bin/perl. When you 
> have a
> script interpreter, it's important for it to be accessible via a well-known
> absolute path.

indeed. the easy solution is to make /usr a symlink to / , as sabotage 
linux does it. that way you have everything in one path, but available 
in 2 different prefixes. saves a lot of nerves.