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'.
Well, I'm not so worried about putting files in /etc without knowing
what ties them to a package given the existance of modern packaging
systems, but we were talking about DEFAULTS, right? I always figured a
package would do --sysconfdir=/etc/nmh, or whatever was appropriate for
the platform.
The actual defaults for nmh, out of the box, without another installation
of nmh installed, are (as of 1.7):
bindir = /usr/local/nmh/bin
libexecdir = /usr/local/nmh/libexec/nmh
sysconfdir = /usr/local/nmh/etc/nmh
I kind of think this is sort of redundant, but at this point I am tired
of arguing about it.
My feeling is that if you want to specify --sysconfdir=/etc, then that's
up to you. If you want to specify --sysconfdir=/etc/nmh (or a package
system wants to do that), that's also up to you.
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.
I ... do not agree with that interpretation of the standard, and I guess
we'll just have to agree to disagree on that.
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.
Well, I would say that Steve wanted the package to behave like it did
before; that seems reasonable to me.
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.
Meh, I just wrote that code this evening; it wasn't very long, really (I
didn't do it that way, but a way I think is actually cleaner). If you
want to peruse the configure help, you'll find it; otherwise you won't.
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.
There's an argument to be made for that, but it would be a change for
users that expect those files all in the same location (and the code
that searches for those files would need to be changed as well; sigh).
--Ken
--
Nmh-workers
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