Why /usr/local/bin /usr/lbin /usr/man/various-dirs

[Chris Torek]

In article <22 at Harald.UUCP> d.jba at harald.ruc.dk (Jan B. Andersen) writes:
>As relative new unix user/admin on BDS and Sys V systems from different
>manufactures I find it very inconvinient with all those different names
>and directory structures. Why do some unixes have /usr/local/bin, while
>other has /usr/bin/local (and src) or /usr/lbin ??
>
>And they all seems to have their own convention as to how /usr/man should
>be organized. Some has /usr/man/man[1-n] (and possibly /usr/man/manl),
>while NCR has no /usr/man at all! They have /usr/catman/man_[apu]
>instead!
>
>Another thing which I have noticed is all the different flags and dirs
>that /etc/install does or *DONT* accept. Why do it have to be this way??

Laziness and/or obstinacy.  :-)  [stolen from _The TeXbook_]

Part of the problem is that each of these different conventions was
established more or less at the same time by different groups that
never talked to each other.  Some of the solutions are clearly better
than others, but no one wants to change.

Part of this problem will be solved by the file system reorganisation
in new releases of SunOS, BSD, and Ultrix (and, one hopes, SysV), but I
doubt it will ever go away entirely.  POSIX may produce a standard
`install'.  Berkeley have already introduced a convention for handling
multiple machines with a single source tree (as I mentioned here or in
unix.wizards earlier); there is a simple way to retrofit this into an
existing Unix environment, so whether or not other vendors pick it up,
everyone can use it.
-- 
In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Comp Sci Dept (+1 301 454 7163)
Domain:	chris at mimsy.umd.edu	Path:	uunet!mimsy!chris