Date:        Tue, 6 Nov 2001 19:34:27 +0900 (JST)
    From:        Curt Sampson <cjs@cynic.net>
    Message-ID:  <Pine.LNX.4.33.0111061929160.19903-100000@denkigama.nat.shibuya.blink.co.jp>

  | This is true, come to think of it. /usr would be the obvious place to
  | put these, except that /usr is often not available at boot time.

OSF1 (and DUnix, and Tru64 I guess) stick those scripts in (under) /sbin
which is the same idea, but on / which is available - even if having sub-dirs
of a binary directory is something that makes many of us gasp.

  | Maybe we should create a /conf for the user-changed config files,

/conf /etc/conf ... what's in a name?  (ie: I don't care).

  | But this is getting into a different discussion....

Yes.  But related.  The answer to this probably affects the other.

  |     1.	Nobody, it seems, wants ssh keys under ${PREFIX}.

Actually, where $PREFIX is a private directory for the host, they're
just fine there.   Of all the files on the system, where the ssh keys
get stored is one of the ones that matters least to me.  Nothing but the
ssh system every actually touches the things.   /var would be just fine
for them (but then we would upset the people who think /var should be
emptied every boot... ie: that's there should be nothing there which needs
to be backed up).

The problem is that everyone recognises that $PREFIX is not always a
private directory for a host, and ssh keys are one (set of) files that
are absolutely required to be per-host, not shared.   Some people actually
want to be able to share per-host config of other packages, and many of
them have in their configs only info that can be shared.

IMO the latter group ought be served by providing a "shareconfig xxx"
type command - which just copies the xxx config file from the standard
place to someplace else (itself probably defined by a config file, which
itself could be shared...) and replaces the original config file by a
symlink to the shared version.

  |     2. It's a little..."unexpected" that packages that duplicate programs
  | 	in the main system (sendmail, postfix, named) would have their
  | 	config files move when you install the package

Yes.  There should be one place for all per-host config files, and all
such files should go there, regardless of how the system that uses the
config happened to be installed.

kre