conf/78419: /etc/termcap is a symbolic link

[Eygene A. Ryabinkin]

The following reply was made to PR conf/78419; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: "Eygene A. Ryabinkin" <rea at rea.mbslab.kiae.ru>
To: Roman Kurakin <rik at cronyx.ru>
Cc: Brooks Davis <brooks at one-eyed-alien.net>,
	FreeBSD-gnats-submit at freebsd.org
Subject: Re: conf/78419: /etc/termcap is a symbolic link
Date: Sat, 5 Mar 2005 10:26:38 +0300

 > Brooks Davis wrote:
 > 
 > >Since we now delete /stand after installation on 6 and the real home of
 > >sysinstall is /usr/sbin, I seriously doubt this will change.
  It is great for 6, but people will use 5 at least for a year. And this problem
 sometimes is a real pain in the ass.
  About moving sysinstall to /usr/sbin: it is not a wise thing, as for me:
 consider disk failure, when all you can mount is a root partition. I am
 expecting sysinstall to be on this partition to use all fancy and easy-to-use
 fdisk, newfs, package manager and other tools. After moving sysinstall to
 /usr/sbin such behaviour is lost and one has to do the things by hand.
  Is there are any real reason to move sysinstall to /usr/sbin?
 
 > Roman Kurakin wrote:
 >
 > The point was that not only sysinstall affected by this problem, but any 
 > application that
 > may use termcap. So we either should check all applications from /bin 
 > and /sbin if
 > they affected by that problem and fix them or do smth else.
  At 5.3-STABLE there are programs in /bin and /sbin that are using ncurses:
 	/bin/csh
 	/bin/ls
 	/bin/sh
 	/bin/tcsh
 	/sbin/fsdb
 	/sbin/gvinum
 	/sbin/ipfstat
 	/sbin/vinum
  I had not checked to what extent each program uses ncurses, but all of those
 presumably using at least initscr() that, AFAIK, tries to read termcap/terminfo
 database.
  Maybe you can explain to me, why termcap database is put to /usr/share/misc,
 rather than to /etc: the /etc is the place for system-wide configuration files
 and it is usually lives on root partition. So, if we can mount root we have
 /etc and thus termcap and all other configuration files. I know many admins
 who are making their /usr/local/etc a symlink to some directory in /etc, just
 to have all configuration in one place: it is proven to be more
 failure-resistant, just by everyday admin expirience of those people.
 -- 
  rea