The debian-private mailing list leak, part 1. Volunteers have complained about Blackmail. Lynchings. Character assassination. Defamation. Cyberbullying. Volunteers who gave many years of their lives are picked out at random for cruel social experiments. The former DPL's girlfriend Molly de Blanc is given volunteers to experiment on for her crazy talks. These volunteers never consented to be used like lab rats. We don't either. debian-private can no longer be a safe space for the cabal. Let these monsters have nowhere to hide. Volunteers are not disposable. We stand with the victims.
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Re: /opt and non-free

srivasta@datasync.com (Manoj Srivastava)  wrote on 10.04.97 in <87ragi962d.fsf@tiamat.datasync.com>:

> >>"Andreas" == Andreas Jellinghaus <aj@dungeon.inka.de> writes:
>
> Andreas> IMO it's for packages like StarOffice 3.1, or ADABAS
> Andreas> D. theese are uge packages of commercial software, and /opt
> Andreas> is the best place to install them. it doesn't make sence to
> Andreas> split their files into /usr/bin, /usr/lib, /etc, /var/spool,
> Andreas> /var/lib etc. if you only want to test them, or if their
> Andreas> paths are hard coded.
>
> 	What's wrong with /usr/local? That is where my local (or for
>  test) packages go into, and /usr/local/adabas would work just as well
>  as /opt.
>
> 	I am still undecided about what /opt should be used for, but I
>  don't want to throw it away on local/test packages. I'll wait for the
>  FHS rationale.

The general idea is actually very simple. It's about dividing packages by  
where they come from.

That is, the "OS distributor" puts stuff in /usr and so on.
The "local sysadmin" puts stuff in /usr/local.
And "third parties" put stuff in /opt.

There's another way of looking at this, however. If we recognize that  
there are a nontrivial amount of packages that want to installed  
completely inside one directory (and there are a lot such packages), these  
nicely fit in the /opt scheme.

Of course, there's a reason both views can live side-by-side - there's a  
large overlap in which packages both put into /opt.

The FHS has more details, I believe, but this is the general idea.

MfG Kai