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From: | John Calcote |
Subject: | Re: How to specify /var/lib in autoconf? |
Date: | Wed, 22 Apr 2009 17:41:58 -0600 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.1b3pre) Gecko/20090223 Thunderbird/3.0b2 |
Hi David, On 4/22/2009 11:52 AM, David Bruce wrote:
1. Where to put your program-updated data files. Refer to Chapter 5 of the file system hierarchy standard (latest version is 2.3). I think you're friends are probably right on the money with where your files should go:Hi, I'm about to start modifying my program (Tux Typing) so as to allow creation of custom word lists. The gist is that I need to have modifiable files that are visible to all users. I have been told by knowledgable people that the appropriate location for these files would be /var/lib/tuxtype, similar to where databases place their files. (I presume /var/lib/tuxtype is correct if prefix is /usr, but it would be /var/local/tuxtype with the default prefix /usr/local?). Anyway, how do I specify this in an autotools-based program? The closest predefined variable seems to be "localstatedir", but the autoconf manual says it is "$prefix/var." My Debian system doesn't have either "/usr/var" or "/usr/local/var". Any suggestions?
http://www.pathname.com/fhs2. As far as /usr/var vs. /var, well that's another story. And I don't know the history behind it, but it's got to be ugly. :-) The FHS document alludes to there being a link between /usr/var and /var on systems where /var is on the same partition as /usr. The same applies to /usr/local/var and /var/local. However, that's as far as I can get in digging around about it. Perhaps one of the old-timers on the list knows more of the history.
The localstatedir variable is indeed the root of your package's state information from an Autotools perspective. Often system packagers for Linux distros will set localstatedir directly to /var on the configure command line when building an APT or RPM package. This fixes the issues about where stuff should go during make install.
John
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