*BSD News Article 8721


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From: peter@micromuse.co.uk (Peter Galbavy)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd,comp.sys.sun.admin
Subject: [386bsd / SunOS] Inviting Religious Pathname Flamewars (Not)
Message-ID: <peter.723756894@hilly>
Date: 7 Dec 92 19:34:54 GMT
Organization: MicroMuse Limited, London, England.
Lines: 47

Please *NO RELIGIOUS FLAMES ABOUT THE RIGHT WAY TO DO IT* Thanks.

As part of a small project to get standard sets of binaries up on a
number of platforms (Sun, 386bsd in particular) I am using things like
amd and a perl script to do lots of automounting and sys-linking
around that place, and I am having a problem with finding a good
working set of path names for popular packages.

For example, to allow /usr to be shared and mounted read-only (on Sun
at least, and 386bsd almost) I try to keep *all* system specific
configs in /etc or /var (/var for logs and spooling mainly), but
has anyone got any suggestions on how they do it ? For ISODE, I have
directories /etc/isode, /usr/local/lib/isode, /usr/local/etc,
/usr/local/bin etc etc...

What I want to know is should I lose the "local" bit of /usr/local and
also maybe for GNU packages use /usr/gnu or /gnu etc? One particular
aim is to be able to add the *minimum* number of components to the
users exec path, but still have a reasonably logical seperation of
packages.

*BACKGROUND INFO ALERT*

One of the "features" of the package format I am trying to use (using
already really - it seems to work), is that each package comes in its own
directory on some mountble media (cdrom or read-only nfs partition)
and I am able to type something like "INSTALL gcc" which then make
lots of sym-links to read-only stuff and *copies* config files to
their destinations, allowing the user to then directly run off the
media. (One of the obvious aims is to produce a CDROM that you can take
with you on site visits, mount it and run this stuff straight away.)

Or I may type "INSTALL -copy gcc" to copy off all the files from the
media to local storage for use when I leave the site :-)

I digress, but I hope this will produce some suggestions, before I
embark upon the next round of building binaries...

To try and prevent a possible argument about "I know best" please
reply in e-mail in most cases, and I will eventually summarise (as
well as make any code produced for the install process) available.

Thanks for your time all...
-- 
Peter Galbavy
Tech Support, Micromuse Ltd
Phone: +44 71 352 7774		E-Mail: P.Galbavy@micromuse.co.uk