Re: [Nmh-workers] 1.7's `make clean' is Overzealous.

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi David,

> > https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Directory-Variables.html
> > says
>
> and:
...

But also, at the end,

    If your program installs a large number of files into one of the
    standard user-specified directories, it might be useful to group
    them into a subdirectory particular to that program.  If you do
    this, you should write the install rule to create these
    subdirectories.

    Do not expect the user to include the subdirectory name in the value
    of any of the variables listed above.  The idea of having a uniform
    set of variable names for installation directories is to enable the
    user to specify the exact same values for several different GNU
    packages.  In order for this to be useful, all the packages must be
    designed so that they will work sensibly when the user does so.

To me, that's saying the user does `./configure --prefix=/foo' for all
packages and if we populate /foo/etc/nmh instead of /foo/etc then it's
up to us, not the user, to tack on `/nmh'.  Otherwise, the user has to
look at each package and work out, for each of the paths they might want
to configure away from the default for their platform, whether they
should tack on the package's suffix.  That makes sense.

It occurred to me that we could see how other, prominent, especially
GNU, packages handle this by looking for culprits in /etc/*/ and
/usr/libexec/*/, etc., but I have a fairly minimal install here.

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.
https://plus.google.com/+RalphCorderoy