On Tue, Feb 19, 2002 at 08:25:49PM -0800, Tracy Nelson wrote:
> I'm getting my NetBSD box set up for Java software development.  I'm
> downloading a lot of IDEs and JREs and whatnot, and the question arises:
> where to put them?  Everything else I've installed from pkgsrc goes into
> /usr/pkg, but where do I put the other stuff?  /usr/local?  /var?  What are
> the conventions that describe what should go where?  Would this be covered
> in a systems administration book somewhere?

Tracy, 

http://www.pathname.com/fhs/ is the home of the Filesystem Hierarchy
Standard (FHS). It's a good starting point.  

The filesystem standard says it's "been designed to be used by Unix
distribution developers, package developers, and system
implementors."

NetBSD has /usr/pkg, which does the work of /usr/local on other
systems.  Also, the FHS refers to a /home, which of course on NetBSD
is perverse, since you'd wind up (absent a symbolic link) putting
your user directories in the root partition.  

I'm strictly a tinkerer, hardly the last word on the subject.  FWIW,
my user directories are in /usr/users/home, and anything I install
outside of the package system (not much), goes in /usr/local.  My
theory is:

	/bin, single-user system files
	/usr/bin, multi-user system files
	/usr/pkg/bin, package system files
	/usr/local, my files

HTH

--jkl