I’ve seen a lot of self-hosted software wanting to store their data in /opt, is there any reason why?
/home is deprecated?
I was wondering about that too… According to the spec:
/home is a fairly standard concept, but it is clearly a site-specific filesystem. The setup will differ from host to host. Therefore, no program should assume any specific location for a home directory, rather it should query for it.
Sometimes home directories are in other locations. My University used to have different mount points for different graduating classes on our Unix servers. And I use “/home2” for one of my servers for… reasons.
Though I’m not sure that qualifies as “deprecated”? I get the “non-standard” bit though.
You also have to consider that roots homedir is in /root and not home, so if you’d just assume it’s /home/$USER you’d get in trouble when your programm is run or compiled as root.
"Traditionally, the /opt directory is used for installing/storing the files of third-party applications that are not available from the distribution’s repository.
The normal practice is to keep the software code in opt and then link the binary file in the /bin directory so that all the users can run it."
