Re: hmm...

[Moshe Zadka <m@moshez.org>]

On Tue, 24 Jul 2001, Will Yardley <william@hq.newdream.net> wrote:

> I do like the idea of following the freebsd (i think net and open bsd may do
> this too) convention of putting everything that's not part of base in
> /usr/local/whatever - debian tends to put stuff in /usr for the most part -
> most of the debian systems i've worked on have barely anything in /usr/local

Just  think of all of the things in the stable system as the equivelent
of BSD's base. /usr/local is for *local* additions, and Debian keeps out
of it to let the sysadmin have his way in /usr/local.

> i suppose this confused me at first (having so much stuff in
> /usr/local/whatever) but it makes it easier to tell what stuff you've added,
> and it's easier to upgrade the base system via cvsup.

In Debian, upgrades are much more holistic, usually.
Though, arguably, the best way would be to decide what you consider base,
and "apt-get install `cat my-base`" would auto-upgrade it. If you want
to only upgrade packages you installed, a small script with 
dpkg --get-selections would likely do the job.

Personally, I'm happy that "apt-get upgrade" just upgrades everything there
is to upgrade. And in future apt's (I think) you will be able to tell which 
parts you want from unstable, and which parts should be stable, and so on.

> it is annoying tho when you have something that's installed locally but is
> also part of the base system (ie bind, ssh or whatever) as it's pretty hard
> (afaik) to remove a package that's part of the base system in bsd.

Luckily, except for very few packages, anything in Debian can be uninstalled
with the only effect that dependant packages will also be uninstalled.
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