pretty strange installation target directory?

[Ralf Petry]

hello,
i read about tinc and i liked the concept so i started to try to work with
it, but although i was successful to install all the needed libraries and
whatnots and succeeded with the installation (on a SuSE 8.1) i find the
following information when starting tincd:
Cannot open config file /usr/local/etc/tinc/tinc.conf: No such file or
directory.
Of course there is no such file or directory, because i expected tinc to
generate a directory under /etc where i could put the conf-files to, just
like it was described in the manual.
it wouldn't hurt me to set up a directory where tinc wants it to have, but
why is it asking for /usr/local/etc... instead of /etc/tinc??

thanks in advance
ralf.

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[Guus Sliepen]

On Thu, Feb 12, 2004 at 11:44:19AM +0100, Ralf Petry wrote:

> Of course there is no such file or directory, because i expected tinc to
> generate a directory under /etc where i could put the conf-files to, just
> like it was described in the manual.
> it wouldn't hurt me to set up a directory where tinc wants it to have, but
> why is it asking for /usr/local/etc... instead of /etc/tinc??

Because the File Hierarchy Standard (part of the Linux Standard Base
standard) states that /usr/local is the directory where you install
programs you compiled yourself, as opposed to the packaged programs from
your distribution which go into the "normal" directories. If you read
the INSTALL file or the output of ./configure --help, you will see that
it defaults to /usr/local directories, and you'll also see how you can
change that. Almost every program that comes with a configure script
will install in /usr/local by default. Also, after compiling, the manual
and manpages that came with the source code will contain the paths as
used on your system. Of course, on our website we can't cater for every
installation path that people could choose, so we present just one copy
of the manual and manpages and arbitrarily used /etc and /usr there.

By the way, if you do install it in /usr/local, also mkdir -p
/usr/local/var/run, because tinc 1.0.2 forgets to print an error message
if it can't write its pid file there if that directory doesn't exist.

--
Met vriendelijke groet / with kind regards,
Guus Sliepen <gu...@sliepen.eu.org>