text: On Mon, Mar 12, 2007 at 10:01:20AM -0400, Jim Fulton wrote: > > On Mar 12, 2007, at 1:26 AM, Brian Sutherland wrote: > > > On Fri, Mar 09, 2007 at 01:22:58PM -0500, Chad Whitacre wrote: > >> Jim, > >> > >> First, your comments re: paying attention to sysadmins are > >> well-taken. Thanks. > > > > I was pointed to this conversation and would like to comment > > wearing my > > sysadmin hat about what I would like. How I think web applications > > should be installed on unix. Basically, I'll just go through what > > happens when I install apache, squid or postgres on linux. > > > > When I install an application that is a daemon, > > There is an interesting subtlety here. I think of Zope (or > applications built using Zope components) as applications that can be > run as one or more daemons. To me, a daemon is a particular instance > of an application, not the application itself. I (and my SAs) prefer > to separate software installation from configuration. We prefer that > these be 2 steps. We often run multiple daemons of the same > application on a single machine. The configuration of these daemons > (and cron jobs, and so on) are controlled from a central > configuration database that is mostly independent of the software > install. We don't want deamons installed automatically when an > application is installed. Then perhaps you are more interested in a structure like the one postgresql uses, where there is a namespace in /etc and /var/lib for the specific instance of postgres. All, however, are run as the same system user. Also, I'll note that a well designed packaging system should _never_ blindly overwrite already existing files in /etc, so I would implement your case as: * Install predefined configuration files in /etc * Install daemon package -- Brian Sutherland