/usr/etc?

[Ondrej Vasik]

On Wed, 2013-08-07 at 11:35 -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Ondrej Vasik (ovasik at redhat.com) said: 
> > Now I probably see why I did that - it was in the RPM_BUILD_ROOT from
> > some reason and because of the capabilities change, I needed to
> > explicitly mention all directories created in RPM_BUILD_ROOT. So this
> > commit just exposed /usr/etc explicitly what was in the package payload
> > since at least 2004 (I don't have older data). If noone knows why this
> > directory should exist, I'll be more than happy to drop it...
> 
> Yeah, it's always been in there back to 1998, at least. It came from
> FSSTND (the FHS precursor):
> 	http://ibiblio.org/pub/linux/docs/fsstnd/old/fsstnd-1.2.txt
> 
> ...
> 
> 4.5  /usr/etc : Site-wide system configuration
> 
> Storing configuration in /usr/etc for the software found in /usr/bin and
> /usr/sbin is a problem.  It makes the read-only mounting of /usr through
> CD-ROM or NFS delivery very difficult at best.
> 
> One possible solution that we considered was to completely eliminate
> /usr/etc and specify that all configuration be stored in /etc.  A
> problem with this approach is that it does not properly anticipate the
> possibility that many sites may want to have some configuration files
> that are not machine-local.
> 
> We eventually decided that /etc should be the only directory that is
> actually referenced by programs (that is, everything should look for
> configuration in /etc and not in /usr/etc).  Any configuration files
> that need to be site-wide and are not needed before /usr is mounted (or
> in an emergency situation) should then be placed in /usr/etc.  Then,
> specific files (in /etc) on specific machines may or may not be
> symbolically linked to appropriate configuration files located in
> /usr/etc.  This also means that /usr/etc is technically an optional
> directory in the strictest sense, but we still recommend that all Linux
> systems incorporate it.
> 
> It is not recommended for /usr/etc to contain symbolic links that point
> to files in /etc.  This is unnecessary and interferes with local control
> on machines that share a /usr directory.
> ...
> 
> It (and /usr/local/etc) were dropped in FHS 2.1 in 2001. So... nuke it?

I already nuked /usr/etc yesterday - as FHS even disallows it (see
http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#USRLOCALLOCALHIERARCHY
Rationale note). But I still see /usr/local/etc there - and mentioned as
beneficial, so keeping it for now.

Greetings,
         Ondrej