On Fri, Nov 13, 2015 at 7:28 AM, Nico Kadel-Garcia <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 29, 2015 at 2:17 PM, Steve Gaarder <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> I always thought that /usr/local was defined to be an area left alone by the
>> operating system.  For many years, we have made it a symlink to a read-only
>> directory in AFS space.  This has worked fine - until now. When I tried to
>> update the "filesystem" package, it failed because it tried to do chmods on
>> (at least) /usr/local/bin and /usr/local/etc.  Why is it doing this?  Is
>> /usr/local no longer truly local?

Sorry, that was my own fault, Now I have my coffee.

The /usr/local/ directories are part of the File System Hierarchy, at
http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#USRLOCALLOCALHIERARCHY
The particular stanza you want to review is below:

    Requirements

    The following directories, or symbolic links to directories, must
be in /usr/local

    DirectoryDescription
    bin   Local binaries
    etc   Host-specific system configuration for local binaries
    games   Local game binaries
    include   Local C header files

etc., etc.

So, yes, it looks like upstream is following the File System
Hierarchy. To play nicely with it, you should ideally, replace the
subdirectories in /usr/local/ with individual symlinks.

And you've my sympathies: I just spent some work dealing with systems
where someone had replaced "/opt" with a symlink to "/usr/local" and
not documented why anywhere, and seriously broke new software that
expected the SELinux privileges it had set for commercial software in
"/opt" to be useable.