Am 5/4/2011 15:58, schrieb Kacper Kornet: > On Wed, May 04, 2011 at 07:52:30AM +0200, Johannes Sixt wrote: >> Looking closer, the patch introduces git_etcdir for no good reason, >> IIUC. >> It should just re-use sysconfdir (the meaning of this variable is to >> point >> to the etc directory). > > And the first version of my patch did it. However Junio has written: > >> But this part in the Makefile outside the context of the patch bothers >> me. It seems to imply that sysconfdir is _not_ that variable you want >> to >> define later. >> >> # Among the variables below, these: >> # gitexecdir >> # template_dir >> # mandir >> # infodir >> # htmldir >> # ETC_GITCONFIG (but not sysconfdir) >> # ETC_GITATTRIBUTES >> # can be specified as a relative path some/where/else; >> >> So I have a suspicion that your patch as is will break when prefix is >> set >> to something other than /usr directory. I don't think anybody in-tree >> currently uses sysconfdir, but that does not mean nobody will ever do. > >>From that I understood that he prefers sysconfdir to be always an > absolute path. Junio's worries should not be discarded lightly. But in this case they are unfounded. Digging the history shows: b51b8bbf (Create a sysconfdir variable, and use it for ETC_GITCONFIG, 2007-04-24) introduced the variable to be able to treat the special case where prefix == /usr. It was never intended as a user-settable value. In 49fa65a7 (Allow the built-in exec path to be relative to the command invocation path, 2008-07-23), I added the comment above because at that time, a relocatable build should be requested by setting ETC_GITCONFIG to a relative path, but not by changing sysconfdir. (The comment sounds as if the user can set sysconfdir, but I did not intend to say that.) 026fa0d5 (Move computation of absolute paths from Makefile to runtime (in preparation for RUNTIME_PREFIX), 2009-01-18) practically obsoleted sysconfdir. In particular, it removed one of the cases where the value of sysconfdir mattered, leaving only the reference where it is guaranteed to be set to /etc. This commit could have removed sysconfdir entirely. 6df42ab9 (Add global and system-wide gitattributes, 2010-09-01) added another consumer of sysconfdir, but in the same spirit as ETC_GITCONFIG. So, I don't think that sysconfdir must survive. It was always only a helper variable to shorten the code. -- Hannes -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html