Configuration files

[Geoff Shang]

Hi,

A friend of mine is fond of saying the following:

The nice thing about standards is that there's so many to choose from.

The issue here is that different systems have different defaults.  Debian 
packages have a standard place for putting things.  Tarballs usually 
install to /usr/local but not always.  Other systems or distributions will 
install to other places.  I don't have anyhting in /opt on my system for 
example but some do.

You basically have two options.  First, you can put everything in the same 
place so you know where to find it, though you can run into trouble if you 
mix packages with source tarballs.  The second is to let things go where 
they go and live with it.

I usually do the latter, partly because I prefer to install tarballs to 
/usr/local and let packages install to other places, and partly because I'm 
too lazy to bother with configure options, etc.

At the end of the day, as long as the things that need to find your files 
can find them, you'll be OK.

Geoff.