[Nmh-workers] Directory layouts for example/contrib/doc files

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

On Apr 16, 2014, at 7:16 PM, Ken Hornstein <address@hidden> wrote:

> "contrib" came in being because of replyfilter.  It sort of sits apart
> from nmh; it's a hack, but a useful one that filled a need (that we
> haven't quite solved natively).  It also required functionality that
> nmh had to add.  It's a bit of an odd duck, really.  Other programs came
> a bit later.  The commonality here is that all of these things are simple
> one-file items that it's not worth setting up a distribution for.

On FreeBSD we tend to use /usr/local/share/examples/<package>/ to hold these 
sort of files.  But the categories get fuzzy, and each OS has its own 
convention.  On FreeBSD you would likely see:

  /usr/local/share/doc/nmh/             doc files
  /usr/local/share/examples/nmh/        examples (e.g. contrib stuff)
  /usr/local/share/man/                 man pages
  /usr/local/libexec/nmh/               executables from .../nmh/lib/...
  /usr/local/etc/nmh/                   config files
  /usr/local/bin                        user commands

Okay, you would if I was setting up the port ;-)

You see the /usr/local/share/examples/<package>/... convention mirrored in a 
number of ports, and indeed in the base system (cf. /usr/share/examples/pf/...)

Yes, many FreeBSD ports choose to spam /usr/local/share/<package> directly.  I 
plan to write a must-have bit of software called 'examples' (or perhaps 'man') 
just to make life miserable for everyone ;-)

Anyway, what's my point?  On FreeBSD at least (where my part of the 
conversation started), the things we put in ./docs/contrib in the nmh source 
directory  naturally belong in /usr/local/share/examples/nmh/.

--lyndon

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