The Caffeinated Penguin

Posted By matt on January 30, 2010

It used to be that, back in the day, /usr/local was an NFS mount on a central server, with appropriate trickery so that each machine got the correct binaries for its architecture. This allowed for reduced storage requirements, plus easy upgrades of new applications. I question if this is an idea which has basically become obsolete.

Given:

• computers have become a sufficient commodity that everyone has their own
• disk space (eg fast local storage) is cheap

We can evaluate our objectives in that context:

1. Centralized application distribution is no longer necessary in that sense. Just add an additional in-house repository to your clients’ existing repository list and you’ve done the same thing, only with fast local storage. I mean, I suppose you could still install them to /usr/local, but it wouldn’t be a network mount.
2. On the individual machine side, I’d also tend to install things like video games in /usr/local, so that all users could share them – except there’s only one user on the machine, so what’s the point? For that matter, rather than installing whatever it was on two machines, just install it in your homedir and sync it amongst machines. For that matter, if it doesn’t work in the machine, just exclude it from the sync list.

I suppose that this isn’t really revolutionary, but I just realized that I was doing it stupidly, so I figured I’d share.

Category: Computers, Software
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