Re: Server Adjustments

[Richard Ash]

On Tue, 2009-12-15 at 13:02 -0500, Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:
>    So, Makefile should receive the value of $(sysconfigdir) from the
>    configuration process.
> 
> You can pass something like `-DCONFFILE=$(sysconfdir)/foo.conf' in
> Makefile.am when compiling via foo_CPPFLAGS so that the program can
> find the configuration file in the right spot.
> 
>     What do you suggest ?
> 
> Not installing it, period; that is what we do for inetutils with for
> example inetd which requires $(sysconfdir)/inetd.conf to work. Put a
> note in the documentation, with an example configuration file.  Anyone
> installing a program should have read the README, INSTALL and the
> manual.
If you have a default configuration file you would like people to use /
start from, you could install it along with the README into the
documentation directory (so /usr/share/doc/<pkg> or some such), so you
can in the documentation recommend that users copy that and modify it.

This will usually survive the distribution packaging systems and so
still be available to users who get a deb, rpm etc without them having
to download the source tarball as well to find it ...

NTP now does this for /etc/ntp.conf - /usr/share/ntp/ntp.conf on this
system, which avoids facing the administrator with trying to write
configuration file from scratch if the distribution doesn't come up with
one.

Richard