Re: Changing the defaults for --localstatedir and --sysconfdir?

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi Richard,

Richard Sent <richard@freakingpenguin.com> skribis:

> As everyone who's built Guix from source knows, when running ./configure
> on a system with an existing Guix installation you must remember to
> specify --localstatedir=/var and --sysconfdir=/etc. I think we should
> consider whether those variables should default to those values.

I think it would make sense.

Before I advocated that we should preferably stick to the GNU standards
and have users make informed choices (that’s how we ended up with the
‘GUIX_CHECK_LOCALSTATEDIR’ macro that warns users but lets them
explicitly pass ‘--localstatedir’.)

That was 8 years ago though (eight!).  At this point I think defaulting
to /var and /etc would do more good than harm.

What do others think?

Thanks,
Ludo’.