Jim Starkey wrote:

>I'm perfectly willing to let the debate continue, but at the moment
>I favor using the registry on windows and inventing a scheme on
>Unix until the Unix world recognizes the need for a registry
>equivalent (or somebody tells me that Unix has had one for five
>years and I'm just to ignorant to recognize it).

Some people in the Unix world have recognised the need some something like
that, but encounter enourmous resistance from those who believe that the One
True Way was discovered when their favourite version of Unix was released.
This leads to symlink forests and general pain.

Given the constraints of Unix, I prefer Dan Bernstein's approach. See
http://cr.yp.to

Essentially, a package knows where it lives in its executables. Because the
package is distributed as source, an administrator can change where that is
through changing a configuration parameter. However, anyone distributing
binary versions is not permitted to change the package's home. If a user
installing a binary version desparately wants the package to live somewhere
else, they either modify the configuration and recompile, or use symlinks.
This ensures that configuration files, etc., are found in known places.

Jan Mikkelsen
janm@...