http proxy:suggestion

[David Lee]

On Fri, 22 Feb 2008, shuttlebox wrote:

> On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 3:49 PM, David Lee <t.d.lee at durham.ac.uk> wrote:
> >
> >  [...]
> >  Those scripts already do:
> >    if [ -f /etc/sysconfig/MailScanner ] ; then
> >         . /etc/sysconfig/MailScanner
> >    fi
> >
> >  But that file seems oriented to variables specific to "MailScanner.conf".
> >
> >  Could there also be a "/etc/sysconfig/MailScannerEnv" (or similar) whose
> >  purpose would be for environment variables for scripts?
>
> I'm all for supporting environment variables like http_proxy but if
> the scripts should be overhauled it would be better if they were made
> in a more Unix generic way. Sysconfig isn't even a Linux standard but
> a Red Hat one. :-)

"The great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose
from."  (Don't know who originally said it, but it seemed relevant...)

I think this pathnaming issue is an area where each OS (perhaps even
flavour within an OS) is different.

For instance, for this particular directory, Redhat-based systems
(including Fedora, Centos) seem to use "/etc/sysconfig/", whereas Solaris
seems to use "/etc/default".  There just isn't a nice, single "standard".

<Technical digression>

In the world of portability, this is something that the developers and
packagers handle by abstraction; in a typical automake/autoconf package,
represented as (for instance) "@SYSCONFIG_DIR@".  By the time it installs
on the end-user system that has been substituted with the correct value,
which is different on different OSes.

That's certainly what we do in the maintenance and packaging of the
"heartbeat" (aka "Linux-HA") package.  Each end-system automatically ends
up with the correct value for the pathname.

</Technical digression>

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