Just a quick aside comment to say that you are linking to an 11 year-old version of the confusingly named FHS (Filesystem Hierarchy Standard) defining the FSH (FileSystem Hierarchy).

The latest version is 3.0, from June this year.

Although your verbatim is unchanged in the current version, here is a link to the same section of version 3.0:
 http://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/FHS_3.0/fhs/ch04s09.html

Benjamin Lefoul


________________________________________
From: [log in to unmask] [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Nico Kadel-Garcia [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Friday, November 13, 2015 1:36 PM
To: Steve Gaarder
Cc: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Filesystem package messes with /usr/local

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.