On Fri, 31 Jul 1998, Tim Rightnour wrote:

> On 31-Jul-98 Perry E. Metzger spoke unto us all:
> #  Tim Rightnour writes:
> # > I've been compiling a ton of games lately (if you haven't noticed) and have
> # > been placing scorfiles and datafiles in $(X11BASE)/share.  However, it
> # > occurs
> # > to me that a few older pkgs, and some other non-game stuff is using lib.
> #  
> #  I won't express an opinion on data files, but score files belong in
> #  /var.
> 
> Are we sure we want to pollute var like that?
> 
	The games that ship with NetBSD already use /var for their
	highscores, so its not _too_ much additional pollution :)
	One 'nice' thing I noticed with the default DEC config on the
	sharks was running /var from an mfs, extracted from a
	tarfile in /etc. Not to everyone's taste, but possibly something
	we could keep in mind when making changes to /var...

> Another issue here might be complexity..  It can be done.. don't get me wrong..
> but now we have to do things like patch programs that have a generic DATA_DIR
> cpp define and make them all use our own SCORE_DIR define.  I suppose having
> them in /var isn't so terrible.. though it does make scorefiles unshareable
> across machines..  and now you would have to manually touch /var files in order
> to run the game from NFS..

	Hmm.. game scorefiles seem to be a special case - we do not have
	anthing	else which is 'writable and sharable between machines'.

	One option is $PREFIX/var (to keep everything inside /usr/pkg
	where possible), and let people who want games _and_ readonly
	shared $PREFIX make that a symlink to somewhere else...
	As long as its documented is should be fine...

		David/absolute

	"You think you're God's gift to the opposite sex"
	"Maybe... if you believe in a malevolent God."