D J Bernstein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> All I'm asking for is a single cross-platform location, /var/qmail,
> where users and scripts and other programs can find the qmail files.
> That doesn't stop you from symlinking /var/qmail/bin to a shared disk,
> if you have coordinated all compile-time information, notably the uids.
> Vendors that include qmail in the base package can easily do this.
My experience is that having stuff live in more than one canonical
location is a disaster waiting to happen. Probably not from a security
perspective, but from a maintenance one. It *seems* like a
straightforward solution, but I've gotten bitten by symlink forests too
many times; they either don't get created right or they end up pointing to
the wrong thing or people who don't understand what's going on can't
manage to figure out why something isn't working right.
I really don't think this particular problem has any good solution. I
like to use a single directory tree for some packages; for other packages,
I'd rather install everything seperately into standard locations. For
package management in AFS, we install every package into its own mini
installation tree and create symlink forests, but I've done this for local
disk installs and never would again. You sort of have to do this for AFS
because you can't fit all of your software in one volume and you want to
have separate release control over the different chunks of it, though.
--
Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <URL:http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
