FreeTDS Development Group

["Brian Bruns" <camber AT ais.org>]

> > From: Brian Bruns [mailto:camber AT ais.org]
> > Sent: June 12, 2002 7:22 AM
> > 
> > for historical reasons, FreeTDS installs in a path 
> > not searched 
> > by default.  Remedy #4 would be to configure freetds with either 
> > --prefix=/usr or --prefix=/usr/local to place the libs in a 
> > path that is 
> > searched.  The RPMs do this actually.
> 
> Ah.  Would the "historical reasons" have anything to do, say, with not
> stepping on Sybase's libraries?  Naively I ask: should /usr/local be the
> default prefix?  It would be less to explain.  
> 
> Otherwise, I think I'll include remedy #4, too.  
> 

The historical (or is it hysterical?) reasons basically revolve around the
interfaces file.  Since $SYBASE/interfaces is the expected place it makes
sense to contain this in a directory of some sort instead of having
/usr/interfaces or /usr/local/interfaces cluttering up peoples file trees
;-)

I believe that beginning with 0.53 we no longer install the interfaces
file by default (a point to mention in the UG maybe?), but instead only
install the freetds.conf/locales.conf in $sysconfdir.  This works well for
the /usr/local arrangement, since there is typically a /usr/local/etc but
for /usr what may be wanted is something like

./configure --with-prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc/freetds

My personal opinion is that /usr is no place for third party software
packages, so the /usr/local option is preferred.

Brian