Why or why do distros put stuff in non-default locations?

[Dave Anderson]

Examples:

I had Slackware 7.1 on my machine. Finally getting arround to upgrading my Samba and making it a server so my WIN2K SP2 machine can connect to it.

Slack has smbd and nmbd in /usr/sbin
Slack has smb.conf in /etc/smb.conf

I download, compile, and install Samba 2.2.1a. By default it installs into /usr/lobal/samba

Why the two different locations? It bugs the hell out of me knowing I have an older version kicking around on my machine. Is there something I missed here? How should I have done this?

What are you recommendations for handling this? I expect to have a similar problem with Apache.

Thanks for any help.

[Malakin]

When you install a distro programs are usually placed in /usr/bin/. When you install programs yourself they usually go in /usr/local/bin/

When you upgrade something and it's put in a different location, you either delete the first copy or over write it with the new copy.

Package management systems on modern distros take care of problems like this, of course hardcore slack guys like yourself wouldn't want to use newbie stuff like that now would they?

sorry couldn't help the sarcasm :)

[ 28 September 2001: Message edited by: Malakin ]

[Dave Anderson]

Package management tends to suck ***.

My problem is that I don't see any way to upgrade OVER the old copy. ./configure
--help shows about 11 different directory entries, and Slackware does indeed spread the samba **** all over the place. I'm not going to spend all day finding and typing in the different locations to put stuff.

And how do I go about deleting the old one? I have no idea where all of the old Samba files are. Is there any way to find out?

./configure should be smart enough to look for an older version on its own. Really sucks.

[Dave Anderson]

I figured out my choices here.

1) Run setup, go to package removal to remove old samba. Now I can setup by hand with no old copy lying about. I should've known this already.

2) Download latest Samba package from Slackware's FTP site. I assume this is the latest. That way I can continue to use the "package management" crap...

I'll probably stick with option 1.

[Arvoreen]

Redhat is setup in a very similar way, with everything being in /usr instead of /usr/local. Since I've been using RedHat all along, this just seems normal to me. I build most of my stuff from source, because many RPMs and binary packages and stuff install into /usr/local, and I hated having everything all over the place. The way around it is when you run the ./configure script for setting up the makefiles before you compile a software package, give it the --prefix=/usr parameter, and that'll make it install stuff into /usr/bin, /usr/lib, etc.
:D