by default in /var and not in /usr/var/ ?

[Simon McVittie]

On 23/10/15 16:02, linuxcbon linuxcbon wrote:
>   you mean, GNU standard is /usr/var/ and not /var/ ?
> Where did you get that from ? /usr/var/ has never been standard. It's
> /var/ the standard.

There are many competing "standards" for how the layout of a Unix system
should look. I think you are probably thinking of the FHS, which
Autoconf's defaults are not intended to follow. Autoconf's defaults
follow the GNU Coding Standards, which say, among other things:

"$(localstatedir) should normally be /usr/local/var, but write it as
$(prefix)/var"
--
https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Directory-Variables.html#Directory-Variables

This does not match the FHS, Debian Policy, the Fedora Packaging
Guidelines, or any other set of OS distributor standards that you might
prefer - but at least it's consistent with every other Autoconf-based
package.

Making dbus' defaults behave differently would not actually save any
work for OS distributions, because they *already* all need to have a
standard set of configure options to deal with the mismatch between the
GNU Coding Standard and what they actually want to ship. All it would do
for OS distributions would be to annoy them by being different for no
good reason, and potentially breaking their standard set of configure
options (which would require them to have a special case for dbus).

-- 
Simon McVittie
Collabora Ltd. <http://www.collabora.com/>