I wrote:

> So, does anyone mind if I create a $PREFIX/share/games, $PREFIX/var and
> a $PREFIX/var/games in mk/NetBSD.pkg.dist?

then Ty Sarna wrote:

> I object to ${PREFIX}/var, because many people would like to keep their
> ${PREFIX} read-only. I don't see any reason stuff can't just go into /var

We already lose wrt to games and other things currently that want to
write to ${PREFIX}.

Christoph Badura then wrote:

> Yes, I do!
>
> This change implies that I have to mount $PREFIX read-write.  That should
> *not* be necessary.  The score files belong into /var/games.  Besides, anyone
> who wants to have site-wide score files needs to share /var/games anyway.

See above.

I had a think about this on the train into work this morning and come up with
the following ideas:

 + Have some variable somewhere (any ideas?) that says whether or not to
   use /var or ${PREFIX}/var.

 + Use symlinks for ${PREFIX}/var to somewhere else.

That being said, my first implementation actually used /var/games,
and now I'm tossing up whether or to go back to that or just rely on
symlinks.

Given that packages can't be installed on read-only clients so there's
going to have to be a bit of manual work to install the extra score
files and the like on these machines, I think the symlink idea sounds
best.  This should just require a bit of fudge with the mtree dist file
to make some things ignored, no?  Is everyone cool with this?


For what it's worth, we use a funky heterogenous /usr/local setup here
(and game score files live in /usr/local/share/games/<somewhere>) that
is mounted read/write everywhere, although I'm moving the NetBSD boxes
to a /usr/pkg setup...

Simon.