[Thinlinc-technical] etc location

[Peter Astrand]

On Thu, 27 Sep 2012, Tobias Oetiker wrote:

> There is one thing about thinlinc deployment I wanted to talk about
> for some time ...
>
> you keep your configuration in
>
> /opt/thinlinc/etc
>
> which is rather odd at least in linux/solaris land, we therefore moved it to
>
> /etc/opt/thinlinc
>
> putting a compatibility link into the original location ...

Hi. For the TL client, we have several different packages, including a 
tarball which can be unpacked in any location, or even executed from an 
USB stick etc. This requires that all necessary files are below the client 
directory tree. For simplicity, we are keeping the same structure also for 
the RPM and DEB client (with a minor exception: those also contains 
/etc/profile.d/tlclient.{sh,csh}). Basically, the client is built with a 
--prefix=/opt/thinlinc in this case, but the client is also relocatable, 
and can be moved to any location/prefix.

Wrt the server, it is currently not relocatable: It must be installed 
below /opt/thinlinc. In principle, this means that we should be able to 
move configuration files from /opt/thinlinc/etc to /etc/opt/thinlinc. We 
have created bug 402 for this. When it comes to the standard, FHS says:

"Host-specific configuration files must be installed in /etc/opt."

But it also says:

"Generally, all data required to support a package on a system must be 
present within /opt/<package>, including files intended to be copied into 
/etc/opt/<package>"

So just moving everything from /opt/thinlinc/etc to /etc/opt/thinlinc in 
our packages etc is not enough, as I read it. An additional thing to 
consider is that configuration files which are not host-specific are not 
required to be below /etc; they are probably better located below /opt. 
This could include files such as /opt/thinlinc/etc/conf.d/profiles.hconf, 
since the profile configuration is usually cluster wide rather than 
host-specific. But of course, if you want to share /opt/thinlinc even 
between multiple clusters, this does not apply, even though files such as 
/opt/thinlinc/etc/thinlinc-release could be shared between all of them.

To summarize, there are a lot of things to consider...

Regards, 
---
Peter Astrand		ThinLinc Chief Developer
Cendio AB		http://cendio.com
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