Re: pg_config/share_dir

Tom Lane wrote:
> I'm wondering why localedir is even treated as an independently
> settable directory in the first place.  Why doesn't the code just use
> PGSHAREDIR and plaster on a hardwired "/locale"?

You can't really set localedir independently; it's hardwired to 
$prefix/share/locale (see config/program.m4 for details).  The reason 
that it's dealt with separately from $datadir ($prefix/share) is to 
arrive at a conventional layout when prefix=/usr (or /usr/local etc.).  
datadir would then be /usr/share/postgresql and localedir would 
be /usr/share/locale.  This is just the way most software arranges 
these things.  Earlier versions of gettext (or non-GNU versions of 
gettext?) also had a hard-coded path where it looked for the locale 
data, which sort of lead to the convention that the locale files have 
to be in that particular directory.

> Certainly we make only minimal use of sysconfdir at present.  But we
> have the infrastructure for it in configure, path.c, etc, and it
> seems to me that pg_config support should be considered part of that
> infrastructure.  If it's not important enough to be in pg_config, why
> is it a separate option at all?

I'd say that the nonexposure of sysconfdir is an oversight.

-- 
Peter Eisentraut
http://developer.postgresql.org/~petere/