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

[Simon Tournier]

Hi,

On jeu., 02 mai 2024 at 11:00, Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:
> 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.

I have always been for changing the defaults but GNU standards…

> 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’.)

…and I have never understood this argument. :-)


Well, these GNU Standards read:

  ‘sysconfdir’

     [...]

      This directory should normally be /usr/local/etc, but write it as
      $(prefix)/etc. (If you are using Autoconf, write it as
      ‘@sysconfdir@’.)

  ‘localstatedir’

      [...]

      $(localstatedir) should normally be /usr/local/var, but write it
      as $(prefix)/var. (If you are using Autoconf, write it as
      ‘@localstatedir@’.)

    https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html#Directory-Variables


As Ricardo pointed, it could be confusing to have some defaults as GNU
Standards recommend and only 2 different.  Especially, $(prefix) might
appear elsewhere as recommendation: ’exec_prefix’ so then ’bindir’,
’sbindir’ etc., ‘datarootdir’ so ’datadir’, ‘sharedstatedir’,
‘includedir’, etc.

Therefore, setting also by default ’prefix’ as /. would mean ’bindir’
equals to /bin.  That’s fine… we need to adjust accordingly
guix-install.sh, to my knowledge.

Well, this ’prefix’ default matters only in one case: other distro
packaging Guix, right?

And I guess these distro do not run “make install” with the default GNU
Standards ’prefix’ recommendation (/usr/local/bin/) and modifies it to
/usr/, I guess.

On foreign distro:

        $ ls -a /usr/local/bin/
        .  ..  guix

This ’guix’ comes from guix-install.sh.

All in all, the surprise when defaulting ’prefix’, ’localstatedir’ and
’sysconfdir’ should be very limited, no?

Cheers,
simon