In my
experience, the most
redundant part of the
Unix filesystem.
It's got exactly the same structure as /usr, and its directories (mostly) have the same purposes. So when something gets installed to /usr/local instead of /usr, it causes needless confusion, especially since I've never run a Linux distro that has /usr/local/bin in its path by default, or looked for libraries in /usr/local/lib.
So what's the point of having this be a seperate directory? Is there any reason why I can't just symlink it to /usr and resolve these problems forever?
I know that the difference is supposed to be that /usr is for programs that come with your distro and /usr/local is for stuff you install yourself, or something like that. Wishful thinking, I say, because everything installs to /usr anyway because at least it'll WORK there without the user having to move files around.
Recently, I tried to get Pike and pigtk set up. Both had to be compiled from source. When I finally found a version of Pike that would compile, it put itself in /usr/local/bin, while pigtk expected it to be in /usr/bin. So I moved it. After struggling with getting pigtk to compile also -- people release too damn many programs that don't compile - I went and ran the Pike script I'd been doing all this in order to run, and it didn't work. I looked at the script and it wanted Pike in /usr/local/bin. Aaaargh!