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The difference is stuff installed in /opt is encapsulated inside its own folder, whereas everything in /usr/local is shared (one bin dir, one lib dir, etc). So

The difference is stuff installed in /opt is encapsulated inside its own folder, whereas everything in /usr/local is shared (one bin dir, one lib dir, etc). So if I want to uninstall Ruby from /opt I do something like this: rm -rf /opt/ruby-1.8.7 To uninstall Ruby from /usr/local is a lot more work.

nudded 17y ago
you could actually do the same in /usr/local. all you need to do is install all packages to their own folder (eg /usr/local/custom/ruby-1.8.7) and then symlink the binary to /usr/local/bin. http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/tree/ http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/tree/ is a package manager that tries to do just that
- tsally 17y ago
  Seems like you might as well do it in opt then, since it is far less common to encapsulate things in folders in local.
- sant0sk1 17y ago
  Sure you could do something like that, but the OP did not suggest such a practice.
pohl 17y ago
I've often wondered about the difference between /usr/local and /opt. Thank you for posting this.