packaging suggestions.

[John (J5) Palmieri]

On Tue, 2006-02-14 at 15:05 -0500, Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-02-15 at 08:54 +1300, Michael J Knox wrote:
> > I am attempting to package bro (bro-ids.org) and have a couple of
> > questions. 
> > 
> > When bro is installed it installs its self into /usr, which is fine, but
> > it also creates a bunch of directories like:
> > 
> > /usr/archive
> > /usr/logs
> > /usr/policy
> > /usr/reports
> > /usr/scripts
> > /usr/site
> > /usr/var
> > /usr/etc
> > 
> > Now I am using the "%configure" macro. 
> > 
> > Are the any issues, reservations, conflicts of packaging policies that
> > the above will create? 
> 
> I don't think I've ever seen the FHS so blatantly violated. Most of
> those things look like they should go under /usr/share/bro, with the
> exception of logs, var, and etc. And possibly reports.

Bro-ids has some seriously messed up Makefile.am files.  Instead of
using automake to determine directories they hardcode everything to
${prefix}/<dir>.  I'm wondering if it even honors DESTDIR.  They install
a VERSION file into ${prefix}/etc.  I haven't looked at the code but my
guess is it hard codes the locations of its data files.  I would say
this all needs to be fixed to use the proper autotools macros before it
can be packaged correctly.

-- 
John (J5) Palmieri <johnp at redhat.com>