Ivan, you've misunderstood what we're talking about here.
We are neither mandating nor even suggesting putting anything
into /etc/, /usr/, or anywhere else in particular in the user's file
system. What we are discussing, is where to locate the AOLserver
config file in the OpenACS CVS repository. Joel and I seem
to have agreed that etc/nsd.tcl
or
etc/config.tcl
or something like that is the best place.
If we do that, what it means for the user, is that when a user checks
out OpenACS from CVS, or downloads and untars the OpenACS release
tarball, he can put it anywhere he wants. But if he, say, untars
OpenACS into /web/mysite/
, then
/web/mysite/etc/nsd.tcl
will already be there, in the
suggested and immediately useable location. There is no reason that
he should have to manually copy the nsd.tcl we give him from some
other random location into /web/mysite/etc/
. He
can move thigns around if he wants to. But the new docs are
going to recomend using that location for the AOLesrver config file,
so we might as well actually put it there.
For the vast majority of people who will be happy with the standard
OpenACS AOLserver config file and it's standard location, it's much
easier and simpler to just have it there ready to go right out of the
tarball. That way, those folks automatically get the benefit of
OpenACS best practices. And for the minority who want to do it there
own way, they can, this change makes absolutely no difference to them.
But there's no reason to force people to "roll their own",
which is what we're doing now.