On Fri, May 06, 2005 at 10:10:31 -0500, Matt Housh wrote:
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Greetings, all.
I'd like to start some discussion about explicitly setting sysconfdir (or confdir or whatever the package uses) back to /etc instead of letting the default prefix decide it.
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So here's what I'm getting at: Why do we use /usr/etc? Is it simply because that's the default when --prefix=/usr is used? I think we should use it because it's stated in the directory layout rules of CRUX: http://www.fukt.bth.se/~per/crux/doc/handbook.html#Package-Guidelines-Direct...
/usr/etc/<prog>/ Configuration files /etc/ Configuration files for system software (daemons, etc) That said, we certainly have packages not following this rule, at least not explicitely.
I can understand not wanting to put things in /etc that aren't vital to the running of the system but on the other hand, things are starting to fail in weird ways the more apps I install (graveman today was what really brought this to my attention, though). While it seems we can force some things to use /usr/etc/xdg instead of /etc/xdg, others just flat-out don't support a non-default location correctly, from what I'm seeing. I quite like to have a small /etc; I currently have 84 entries in /etc, and 11 in /usr/etc (I have no desktop environment installed). I'm not sure if this is significant, though... I could certainly live with both, but I'd rather have a smaller /etc already now and therefore think moving everything to /etc would be a step in the wrong direction.
That said, I'd prefer the following solution: put it into /usr/etc first; if problems occur (and I guess this is the hard part: finding out that those problems are related to sysconfdir), execute the "bad-sysconfdir" procedure: 1. switch sysconfigdir to /etc 2. submit a bug to the CLC (soon CRUX?) bugtracker to keep track of it 3. submit a bug to the developer This way, we have at least a working package, as soon as the problem is detected. We should probably also note the symptoms of this problem somewhere on the webpage, to help both new maintainers and users find the cause faster. In addition, we should also go through the existing ports (and those in the new contrib) checking whether there are ports installing to /etc when they should go to /usr/etc. Kind regards, Johannes -- Johannes Winkelmann mailto:jw@tks6.net Bern, Switzerland http://jw.tks6.net