[vbox-dev] integrating virtualbox better into a linux system

[Uwe Hermann]

Hi,

On Wed, Jan 31, 2007 at 08:09:06PM +0100, Michael Thayer wrote:
> At the moment, we create links in /usr/bin to a script in the main 
> VirtualBox directory.  Is there a particular reason not to install to 
> /opt, as we do now?  Personally, I prefer applications which were not 
> installed through my distributions package system to be put somewhere I 
> can clearly see rather than scattered around my system.  That means that 
> if the uninstaller doesn't work for some reason, I can remove them more 
> easily (I know that that will not happen with VirtualBox of course :)

I don't know whether /opt or /usr/local is better in this case.

Using autoconf you'd usually have a 'make uninstall' option which
removes the package content from /usr/local again.
Maybe you can teach kBuild similar things?

 
> I assume though that VirtualBox packages will soon start to appear in 
> Linux distributions, and they will package them to best fit in with the 
> rest of their system.

Yes. The Debian package (and most other distributions, I guess) will put
everything where the FHS wants it to be.

http://www.pathname.com/fhs/

This can be really important in many cases, for example some systems
might have a read-only /usr (ro) or put other limitations on parts of
the file system (noexec, nosuid, nodev), so it _does_ matter where
things reside, usually.


HTH, Uwe.
-- 
http://www.hermann-uwe.de  | http://www.holsham-traders.de
http://www.crazy-hacks.org | http://www.unmaintained-free-software.org
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