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

[David Levine]

Ken wrote:

> Ah, but my question is: are those the individual PACKAGES that do that, or
> is that the packaging system

The individual packages do that.  Here's what Fedora and RedHat EL
pass to ./configure, by default (the packager can override):

    --libexecdir=/usr/libexec
    --sysconfdir=/etc
    --datadir=/usr/share

I mention all three because, they way things are now, nmh ends up
with these directories:

    libexec install path       : /usr/libexec/nmh
    config files install path  : /etc/nmh
    docs install path          : /usr/share/doc/nmh

Which looks good to me.

> If packages are installing
> files in $(sysconfdir)/foo, then I'd like to see how they deal with
> packaging systems to avoid $(sysconfdir)/foo/foo.

I looked at two.  sudo blindly appends its name to libexecdir in
Makefile.in.  So it doesn't try to deal with it.  openssh relies on
configure options.  So it doesn't have the problem, just like nmh
prior to the /nmh additions.  I don't want to re-litigate that.

[from an earlier message:]
> Now, it doesn't seem like the GNU coding recommendations say to put
> stuff in our own directory for sysconfdir; that seems completely
> wrong.  There IS a recommendation to do that for libexecdir; I would be
> interested to see what other packages do there.

If we were to follow that recommendation for sysconfdir, the three
variables would have the package name appended, if the packager
wants to for sysconfdir, in three different places:

    dir        what appends pkg name?    can packager override?
    =======    ======================    ======================
    libexec    package                   no: hard-coded
    sysconf    packager                  yes, at configure time
    docs       autoconf                  yes, at install time

What a mess.  So I think that we should go against the
recommendations for sysconfdir, along with openssh and everything
else with /etc/pkgname/.  (sudo doesn't need to, so it turned
out to not be a great example.)

In other words, for nmh:

    dir        what appends pkg name?    can packager override?
    =======    ======================    ======================
    libexec    package                   no: hard-coded
    sysconf    package                   no: hard-coded
    docs       autoconf                  yes, at install time

And so, I think we should leave things the way they are.  And add
a note to the 1.7.1 NEWS to warn packagers to remove any /nmh
appendages from their configure options.

David