File layout

[Quentin Campbell]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Julian Field [mailto:mailscanner at ecs.soton.ac.uk] 
> Sent: 23 August 2002 19:29
> To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
> Subject: Re: File layout
> 
> 
> At 19:13 23/08/2002, you wrote:
> >I have been playing with MailScanner and Spam Assassin on a relay 
> >server before my main mail server.
> >
> >First, is there a reason that the RPM doesn't use eg 
> /etc/mailscanner 
> >for all the conf files instead of the current 
> >/usr/local/MailScanner/etc  ?
> 
> Not particularly.
> 
> >I can move the files and get it to work ok, but curious why it is 
> >different to what I am used to.
> 
> Just 'cause that's the way I built it :-)
> 

Julian

Your convention of locating stuff under /usr/local and /local is good,
standard, Unix practice! I hope you do not change it. 

This keeps applications isolated from the operating system. In a
carefully set up and partitioned Unix system it is possible to install a
new operating system without having to re-install and re-confgure a
whole corpus of applications. The /usr/local stuff is normally
automounted from /local (or similar).

If you have your applications spread around the system (/etc, /usr,
/usr/bin, etc) then they have to be re-installed when the OS is
upgraded.

This may not seem a big deal on a "simple" mail hub where the main
applications are Sendmail + MS + SA + some anti-virus product. It is
very, very important on a large Unix time-sharing system (as we run
here) where we have many scores of large and complex packages installed.


For this reason I prefer installing from the MS tar ball rather than the
RPM version.

Quentin
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