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

[Efraim Flashner <efraim@flashner.co.il>]

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On Thu, May 02, 2024 at 11:00:15AM +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> 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?

I think changing the defaults to use /var and /etc by default would be a
good change.  If someone needs to use the /usr/local/{var,etc}
directories they're able to change back to the previous defaults
themselves.

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Efraim Flashner   <efraim@flashner.co.il>   רנשלפ םירפא
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