Re: location of the configuration files

"Christopher Kings-Lynne" <chriskl(at)familyhealth(dot)com(dot)au> wrote:

> > Okay, here's one: most Unix systems store all of the configuration
> > files in a well known directory: /etc. These days it's a hierarchy of
> > directories with /etc as the root of the hierarchy. When an
> > administrator is looking for configuration files, the first place he's
> > going to look is in /etc and its subdirectories.

> No goddammit - /usr/local/etc. Why can't the Linux community respect
> history!!!!
>
> It is the ONE TRUE PLACE dammit!!!

Well, to the extent that you're serious, you understand that
a lot of people feel that /usr/local should be reserved for
stuff that's installed by the local sysadmin, and your
vendor/distro isn't supposed to be messing with it.

Which means if the the vendor installed Postgresql (say, the
Red Hat Database) you'd expect config files to be in /etc.
If the postgresql is compiled from source by local admin,
you might look somewhere in /usr/local.

I've got the vauge feeling that this is all more than a
little silly... directory locations floating about depending
on who did what, as thought it were such a radical thing
to do a ./configure, make & make install. But this is a
pretty common feeling among the unix world (more wide spread
than just in the Linux world).