(Please Cc: me, I'm not subscribed.) I've been having a bit of a debate with people lately about the expected behavior of autoconf v.s. "traditional" placement of configuration files. I'm in the middle (well, toward the end) of the migration of GNATS from hand-crafted Makefile.in files to automake driven files, and subsequently updating configure.ac. Traditionally, GNATS installation method is to install configuration files in "$sysconfdir/gnats", which I personally view as a violation of one of the features of autoconf: allow the administrator to dictate where files are installed. If I were to specify prefix=/opt/<package>/<version>, where package=gnats, and version=4.1.999, and bindir=${prefix}/bin, sysconfdir=${prefix}/etc, and so on, I would be a bit surprised and miffed to find my configuration files in /opt/gnats/4.1.999/etc/gnats! "13:01 <@dopp> but, yes, if I said sysconfdir=/etc and it put stuff in /etc/gnats, I'd have to wonder what the maintainer was smoking." -- dopp on #tclug@xxxxxxxxxxxx I interpret bindir, sbindir, sysconfdir and family as contextually dependent upon the software bundle being installed and the options specified at configuration time. sysconfdir is interpreted as, "This is where configuration files for GNATS are stored." They're not to be interpreted as, "sysconfdir is the prefix location for package-specific configuration directories." So, this brings to question the automake variables pkgdatadir and dist_pkgdata_DATA. Do these even make sense? I had initially used them, but now I'm re-considering. It's creating side-affect behavior not advertised in ./configure --help. I plan on going back to simply using datadir. A useful option might be "--enable-layout=STYLE", where STYLE could be well known layouts: gnu (default), fhs, bsd, apache, opt, etc. I believe the Apache project does something like this. I just wanted to validate my assertions before proceeding too far down this path. Objects, assertions, and opinions welcome. -- Chad Walstrom <chewie@xxxxxxxxxxxx> http://www.wookimus.net/ assert(expired(knowledge)); /* core dump */ _______________________________________________ Autoconf mailing list Autoconf@xxxxxxx http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/autoconf