/etc and /usr/local/etc directories

[Jim Trigg]

On Fri, Aug 13, 2004 at 04:03:51PM +0100, Scott Mitchell wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 13, 2004 at 03:42:52AM +0200, Danny Pansters wrote:
> > 
> > For system (OS, that's kernel and userland) settings you have /etc
> > For local (packages/ports) settings you have /usr/local/etc or /usr/X11R6/etc
> > 
> > Of course these two local bases should have been merely hard linked long ago 
> > but that's not my decision :)
> 
> One very good reason to keep these separate is that you might be mounting
> /usr/{local,X11R6} on many machines from a shared NFS drive.  By keeping the
> shared configuration on the shared drive you don't have to replicate it on
> every machine, and /etc just contains machine-specific configuration.

But most of what's in /usr/local/etc is machine-specific.  Personally,
on the next rebuild I intend to make /usr/local/etc a symbolic link to
/etc/local.  (Then again, I plan to use /opt for third-party applications
and /usr/local only for locally-developed applications.  /opt/etc will be
a symbolic link to /etc/opt as well.)

Note that I'm using a symbolic link; this is because /etc is on the
root filesystem while /usr and /opt will be separate filesystems.

Jim
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