On Fri, Nov 16, 2001 at 12:03:56PM +0100, Alistair Crooks wrote:
> I hope that some modifications will be made soon by one of the
> pkgsrc developers which will make the config file location issues
> moot - and much more besides - I'll let him say more about it if
> he wants to.

That would be me.  I have changes that more mostly ready to commit that
allow a package to automatically copy example config files to their final
locations if they don't exist there, and to automatically remove them if
those config files haven't changed.  There's also extra things like creating
a user/group at pre-install time if a package needs to be run as, or have
files owned by, a particular user/group.  These changes merely generalize
some of the INSTALL/DEINSTALL scripts + Makefile logic already found in
several packages, e.g. apache, cups, php, surfraw, horde, etc.

Lastly, rather than trying to convince half the people to agree with the
other half, instead of making the decision to place config files in either
/etc or in ${PREFIX}/etc, packages should try to find their config files in
${CONFDIR}, which is a value set in bsd.pkg.mk defaulting to ${PREFIX}/etc
but may be overridden in mk.conf to /etc.  There shouldn't be too many
packages (relative to the total number in pkgsrc) that require global
config files, so I'll be sweeping through pkgsrc to make them adhere to this
philosophy.

	Cheers,

	-- Johnny Lam <jlam@jgrind.org>