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

[Ken Hornstein]

>> 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