Paul D Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> %% [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Greg A. Woods) writes:
> gaw> This nonsense of giving the user ultimate and complete control
> gaw> over where each and every individual class of files, while at the
> gaw> same time not learning and honouring platform specific policies
> gaw> for the defaults (i.e. choosing defaults that might be suitable
> gaw> only for one class of systems), is big nasty can of worms, each
> gaw> of which has spiky spines and very sharp and fast-moving teeth!
> No. This is exactly the right way to do it.
> Autoconf should provide a well-defined set of directories, each with a
> well-defined purpose/policy, and each with a default value based on one
> global value (prefix) so they're simple to re-target en mass.
> Then it should allow users who care about such things to modify each
> individual value to suit their particular environment.
> That's all it should do.
I partly agree, but we recently ran into this problem with INN as well.
INN is a *huge* package that spreads its installed files out across more
territory than many; in addition to the standard set of binaries, man
pages, libraries, and configuration files, it also has large amounts of
data (the news spool, the overview database, the history file, and the
active file), binaries intended for special purposes run from inside INN,
often Perl or Python code that's dynamically loaded, and reams of log
files, most of which aren't managed by syslog for speed reasons.
Most people who run INN want to treat it as a self-contained subsystem;
the default is to install everything under a $(prefix) of /usr/local/news,
and one of the most common installation patterns is to just use
--prefix=/news. This has a lot of nice properties, such as being able to
put the entire news installation on your external RAID and then being able
to upgrade the operating system or swap the computer without touching the
binaries.
The Linux folks, however, really want to use an FHS-compliant setup. I
personally don't really like that idea, as INN comes with lots of random
binaries that aren't really useful outside of the news system, but that's
the way they really want to install their systems, and there are lots of
little changes that have to be made to do that and the Red Hat, Debian,
etc. folks are all having to do this separately and maintain their changes
separately.
So after hashing this out some on inn-workers, we arrived at the decision
to add a --enable-fhs-compliance option to our configure script that does
the equivalent of setting all the other --*dir options and --with-*dir
options to all the right values to put INN in all the FHS-correct places.
--
Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
