RelocatingConfigFiles

From Ingres Community Wiki

Purpose

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about how we can bust out of our traditional directory structure and use some combination of environment variables and ingres settings to allow for an install that adheres to the Linux File Hierarchy Standard. Unfortunately, this is a project that does nothing to really enhance the functionality of the product, so it typically gets a low priority. I'm convinced that the process will actually make our shell script code much cleaner and more manageable.

Approach

I'm starting with a client-only install, and focusing first on making the name server and the comm server (iigcn and iigcc) run using files in /etc/ingres, and then I'm testing various tools like sql, isql and perfmon. I have a prototype of this working, and while it required a large number of changes to shell scripts, there were actually no changes needed for any of the compiled code, which was quite encouraging.

Next Steps

First, I think I'd like to package up the base package and ingres-net using my relocated files. Then I'll test it on some different machines, have a few others test it, and attempt to integrate it into our main codeline.

There are still some outstanding questions about which things really belong in /etc, and what would be better placed in /var or /usr/share. Timezones and error message files are good examples of this.