change recommended installation directories

[Peter Baumann]

currently, the wiki installation pages recommend to install in /home/rasdaman, which is not the best possible way. Recommendation should be changed to, eg, /usr/local/rasdaman.

[Dimitar Misev]

Personally I prefer somewhere in /home/user, as permission issues are less likely. Perhaps /opt or /srv is a better choice than /usr/local/rasdaman?

[Alex Dumitru]

In the installer, the default path will be /opt/rasdaman. It seems to fit well with both linux standards and our requirements of keeping everything in one place.
Personally I highly dislike the disorganized structure of keeping things all over the place in /

[Dimitar Misev]

I think so too; if you look at /usr/local it has its own structure similar to /usr: bin etc games include lib ..
This doesn't work quite well with server software which consists of a lot of components.

[Peter Baumann]

Replying to dmisev:

Personally I prefer somewhere in /home/user, as permission issues are less likely. Perhaps /opt or /srv is a better choice than /usr/local/rasdaman?

/home/ is not good, it is designed for individual user directories. We had /opt/ until someone came up with the gorgeous idea of distributing all over directories. /srv/ is not for software, but data.

See, eg, ​http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2010/09/linux-file-system-structure/ and ​http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html which says: "/usr can be mounted read-only (if it is a separate filesystem)". Also note that /var/lib is not a good place.

[Peter Baumann]

Replying to mdumitru:

In the installer, the default path will be /opt/rasdaman.

to be discussed (the installer as such cannot make such a heavy decision in isolation). That said, it was /opt/ before someone changed it.

It seems to fit well with both linux standards and our requirements of keeping everything in one place.
Personally I highly dislike the disorganized structure of keeping things all over the place in /

+1

[Peter Baumann]

Whatever we change, we need to think carefully about migration paths.

[Dimitar Misev]

Ok I changed the guidelines on wiki:InstallFromSource to /opt/rasdaman.

[Peter Baumann]

it's not that simple, unfortunately - consequences have not been discussed fully, and migration paths do not exist.

[Dimitar Misev]

What kind of migration paths? This is just a suggestion, it is not embedded into the configure script or elsewhere.

Here's what exactly has been changed: ​http://rasdaman.org/wiki/InstallFromSource?action=diff&version=19&old_version=17

[Dimitar Misev]

I submitted a patch that changes the default install dir to /opt/rasdaman in configure, and also updates the install doc guide.