Re: location of the configuration files

"Christopher Kings-Lynne" <chriskl@familyhealth.com.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).