Hi Ken,
Yes, it does say at the end of that section that it "might be useful"
to group a large number of files into a subdirectory. I would suggest
that means, "it's up to you".
You'd still prefer files directly in /etc? They've no consistency on
their naming, nothing to tie them into nmh when a user does `ls'.
It sure seems to me that if you explicitly specify a directory to
configure, that's what should be used.
GNU say otherwise: That three packages should all be able to be
configured with --sysconfdir=/gnu/etc and if one of them wants to append
`/bar' then that's up to it; the configurer shouldn't need to know and
adjust.
We had a user who had to edit the Makefile to get things where they
wanted to be installed, and that just seems like it sucks to me.
Steve didn't want to follow the standard layout.
I wrote earlier:
At best, a configure option could disable appending `nmh' to two of
the three, but it doesn't seem worth the code and documentation to
achieve this, for the author or all those readers that will have to
decide if they need it.
That still seems the case to me. A --no-etc-suffix buys little, adds
code, adds documentation for installers to read, and compounds the
already high configure options to test.
I believe Lyndon pointed out that this sucked that we had executables
in there, and broke things out into $(libexecdir) and $(sysconfdir) (I
don't think that change was controversial, right?), but we never sat
down and talked about $(sysconfdir) being the right choice.
I suppose there is an argument for those things going in $(datadir),
but mts.conf feels like it might be better in $(sysconfdir).
I didn't mean that all of /etc/nmh/* should move to /usr/share/nmh, but
that each file needs to be considered and some look like they should
move. /etc/nmh is for `read-only data files that pertain to a single
machine–that is to say, files for configuring a host. Mailer...
configuration files, ... belong here' so mts.conf stays.
It could be that once that's done, say for 1.8, that nmh's /etc dwindles
to two files and the subdirectory can be dropped.
--
Cheers, Ralph.
https://plus.google.com/+RalphCorderoy
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Nmh-workers
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