Re: PATH: /usr/local before or after /usr ?

On 16/07/2021 16:50, Cameron Katri via freebsd-current wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 16, 2021 at 09:01:49AM -0600, Alan Somers wrote:
>> FreeBSD has always placed /usr/local/X after /usr/X in the default PATH.
>> AFAICT that convention began with SVN revision 37 "Initial import of 386BSD
>> 0.1 othersrc/etc".  Why is that?  It would make sense to me that
>> /usr/local/X should come first.  That way programs installed from ports can
>> override FreeBSD's defaults.  Is there a good reason for this convention,
>> or is it just inertia?
> The biggest example I can think of this being a problem is having
> binutils installed, it will cause any calls to elftoolchain or
> llvm-binutils to go to GNU binutils which is platform specific, so cross
> compiling, or LTO could be broken because of using GNU binutils which
> don't support cross compiling or LTO.

FWIW: In about 20 years of using FreeBSD, my $PATH has always had 
/usr/local/bin before /usr/bin and I have never once encountered a 
problem from this.  If I install something from ports that's already in 
the base system, it's invariably because I want to use it in preference 
to the base-system version.

David