--with-* vs. path*

Ivan Shmakov oneingray at gmail.com
Wed Jun 11 02:25:37 UTC 2008


>>>>> Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> writes:

[...]

 >> Anyway, for the subdirectory Apache defaults to "/htdocs/", Debian
 >> and Fedora use "/var/www/", and web hosters often extend that scheme
 >> to /var/www/account.name/html/. IMHO the most consistent option
 >> would be --httpdir=DIR, $pathhttp and pathnews/http but
 >> --wwwdir=DIR, $pathhttp and pathnews/www also looks acceptable.

 > Note that there's no way to tell Autoconf to create a new --*dir
 > option; the only ones supported are the ones hard-coded into
 > Autoconf.  configure.ac files can only add --with-* options and
 > --enable-* options.  That's why INN has a bunch of --with-* options
 > that ideally should be --*dir options.

	Actually, I don't see the point of hardcoding a bunch of
	directory names into the INN binaries.  Considering that I'm
	somewhat interested in running several INN instances, it's also
	error-prone to have defaults matching one configuration, but not
	the others.

	Since the whole set of paths is configurable at run-time, the
	only location that needs to be set at the .../configure time is
	that (the default) of inn.conf.  For the rest, the policy is
	then to be as follows:

	* every other location should be set in inn.conf;

	* an error is signalled at run-time if a directory required to
	  perform an operation is not set.

	Perhaps I'd have some spare time to provide a patch.



More information about the inn-workers mailing list