Shouldn't create /usr/local/bin/firefox and thunderbird

ubuntu-mate-default-settings creates two executables, firefox and thunderbird under /usr/local/bin.

First, /usr/local is the place where distributions shouldn't place any files (apart from some standard subdirectories). This is a place for local additions.

Second, whereas the most basic functionality of a package manager is to ship and track files, this package doesn't ship these as normal files but creates them from postinst (and removes from postrm). As such, commands like "dpkg -S /usr/local/bin/firefox" fail to locate which package these files belong to, leaving local sysadmins quite clueless who and why created them.

If I may have a guess, I guess there's some linting tool that rejects package that ship files into /usr/local, and hence this utterly unacceptable workaround. It decides to deliberately break a rule, and in order to be able to do so, it has to and does deliberately break another fundamental rule as well.

In combination with bug #1605887, I think this entire Mate integration should be re-thought from scratch.

E.g. if my firefox startup executes this Mate-specific wrapper even if my desktop environment is not Mate, what's wrong with including these bits directly in /usr/bin/firefox? Or at least include a piece of code there that sources all files under a certain directory, and let Mate ship its extension there?

Let alone the shell scripts are written poorly in at least two ways:
- $@ aren't double-quoted in the script, breaking command line arguments that contain spaces;
- there's no "exec" and bash isn't clever enough to optimize it, leaving an extra "bash /usr/local/bin/firefox" running for the entire firefox session.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 17.10
Package: ubuntu-mate-default-settings 17.10.24
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.13.0-11.12-generic 4.13.1
Uname: Linux 4.13.0-11-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.7-0ubuntu1
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: Unity:Unity7:ubuntu
Date: Sun Sep 24 00:49:11 2017
InstallationDate: Installed on 2016-11-09 (317 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 16.10 "Yakkety Yak" - Release amd64 (20161012.2)
PackageArchitecture: all
SourcePackage: ubuntu-mate-settings
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to artful on 2017-09-21 (2 days ago)