Christopher Allan Webber <[email protected]> skribis: > Every now and then I rebuild Guix and hit the problem where I run > ./configure and then I am reminded that I need to instead do: > > ./configure --localstatedir=/var > > IIRC this is because of GNU standards about default paths and pretty > much no other reason that we don't default to /var. But I think Guix is > a special case. > > Should we ask maybe for an exception?
No need to ask. :-) > There's no reason for users to bump into this. It's annoying even for > me, and at least I know (or think I do) why. I think it would be surprising to users who install from source if localstatedir is not under $prefix by default (someone who wants to install to /opt/foo would be surprised to find out that some files go to /var instead of /opt/foo/var.) There’s also the question of “make dist”, which should still DTRT. We could have $prefix default to /… but that’s not quite what one might expect either. I think the current situation is a good middle ground, even though I can also sympathize with your frustration. Thoughts? It’s weird how a simple question like this can be seemingly this complex to address. :-) Ludo’.
