On Mon, Feb 17, 2003 at 12:59:13PM -0700, Rick Kelly wrote:
  | Martin Husemann said:
  | 
  | >Read the commit message. Luke removed stuff that made installs (and
  | >"build.sh build" runs) remove *my* /home. Making updates not remove
  | >my /home greatly improves NetBSD, in my point of view!
  | 
  | I have machines running 1.4.3 up to -current. If I run "make build" on
  | any of those machines, nothing happens to /home or /usr/local.

There are a variety of issues with having /home and /usr/local
in the "base" set in NetBSD, including:

    *	Those directories may often be (NFS) shared in a heterogenous
    	network, and a NetBSD installcreating and/or changing the
    	ownership and permission of these directories may not be desired.

    	In the case of usr/local, the entries not only created a
    	"top level" directory, but created subdirectories as well.
	"usr/local" is for the local use, and a NetBSD install should
	not be creating/changing entries under there.


    *	If these are symbolic links to other locations, pax will unlink
	the symlink and replace the path with an empty directory.
	This affects extraction of base.tgz and installworld of "base".
	(This can affect other directories which have been symlinked
	elsewhere, but these two were the most reported as problems,
	and NetBSD has no place in modifying these "local" directories)


These issues often cause people inconvenience *every* time they install
the 'base' set.

Conversely, for those that want the old behaviour, the new inconvience
of not having these directories is limited to the initial installation,
and is rectified with a few once-off operations at that time.

Many system changes are controversial, and there will always be
supporters and objectors to the change.  In the particular cases
of /usr/local and /home the trade-off was made to inconvenience
some who took advantage of the previous behaviour on fresh installs
in order to not inconvenience others on every install.