a gentle way to enforce the installation of configuration files into ${PREFIX}/share/examples

[Petar Bogdanovic <petar%smokva.net@localhost>]

Hi,

what would be the ideal `switch' a software should offer in order to
make pkgsrc happy with respect to the handling of configuration files?

Part 15.2.2 of the pkgsrc developers guide says:

   15.2.2. Telling the software where configuration files are

   Given that pkgsrc (and users!) expect configuration files to be in a known
   place, you need to teach each package where it shall install its files. In 
some
   cases you will have to patch the package Makefiles to achieve it. If you are
   lucky, though, it may be as easy as passing an extra flag to the 
configuration
   script; this is the case of GNU Autoconf- generated files:

   CONFIGURE_ARGS+= --sysconfdir=${PKG_SYSCONFDIR}

   Note that this specifies where the package has to look for its configuration
   files, not where they will be originally installed (although the difference 
is
   never explicit, unfortunately).


I never created a package which offered the --sysconfdir switch but it
seems to me that, even with supplying an argument to --sysconfdir, `make
install' will still install all configuration files into the same place.

So, is there some kind of a reference? A piece of software which does it
`right' (at least from a pkgsrc-maintainer's point of view)?


The FreeBSD people seem to take a different approach in order to solve
that problem---they simply break out of $PREFIX with a PLIST entry like
the following one:

        @cwd /etc


Would that be possible in pkgsrc too? If yes, is it desirable to use
something like that?


Thanks,



   Petar Bogdanovic