On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 04:40:07PM -0800, Jordan Brown wrote: > David Powell wrote: > >What about /lib/svc/manifest? > > Sounds right to me. > > B.J. Wahl wrote: > >As a former customer for many years, /etc was the first place I would > >look for general configuration information like this. While I understand > >manifests are considered more definition than configuration information, > >as an Admin I would still expect to see this information in /etc than in > >/lib. > > But manifests are _not_ configuration, and any perception that they are is > a bug that needs to be corrected. Keeping them _out_ of /etc helps to > avoid that perception.
+1 (Manifests are delivered by pkgs, and what pkgs are installed can be seen as a sort of configuration, but I think nonetheless that it's best to think of manifests as not configuration.) I think the fact that we already have /etc/svc may have led you to putting the EMI manifests there, but it really belongs not in /etc. It's important to not mix configuration with non-configuration. Being able to separate configuration from non-configuration was important to the Sun 7xxx storage appliance folks (who, IIUC, had to do a fair bit of surgery to get the system to run with read-only / and SMF repos off in /var). I know we're not really there now, but it'd be nice if we could get there eventually. Adding non-config contents to /etc is less bad than adding config contents outside /etc, but still (and ephemeral contents belongs in /var/run; death to PID files in /etc! death to PID files!). Nico --
