[gentoo-user] Slightly OT: FreeBSD migration, what to do with /usr/local

[Ian Zimmerman]

I think I have written here previously that I want to move my _server_
to FreeBSD.  I am still thinking about that.  But now I hit an
obstacle.  For a long time, I have put my local kiddie scripts in
/usr/local.  For better or worse, they are written in my dense style
where any code duplication is avoided, and so they call one another a
lot.

But as you know FreeBSD directory hierarchy is different: /usr/local is
for Packages and Ports.  I must move my scripts somewhere else to not
conflict with P & P.  So the first problem is to come up with a
location.  What does a typical BSD admin do in this situation?  I don't
want to put them in my home directory because they're general purpose;
at the very least I use them both as root and as an unprivileged user.

A more serious problem is how to find all the situations where
/usr/local is baked in.  It's not as simple as grep because when I
could, I relied on the implicit PATH which would be configured somewhere
else, or it might not even be configured - it might be compiled in (I
think this is the case for some programs in the shadow package, and
perhaps PAM modules).

I don't think I can expect a simple answer, but if you ever faced such
transition yourself, how did you approach it?

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