>> 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 https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers
