Default paths in Base Directory Specification

[Mike Hearn]

> Well, so as there should be just a single fdo installation on most systems...
> this makes a bit "clearer" why the default values should not include the
> installation prefix.
> 
> However, here it goes another idea.  Why don't the configure scripts take
> an argument, say --with-xdg-data-dir, that specifies the path to the fdo stuff
> at _build_ time?  That value could be used as the default value for
> XDG_DATA_DIR (similary for the XDG_CONFIG_DIR stuff), and fallback to the
> current "default" if not given.  This is very easy to implement (given a .m4
> file with the right macros for consistency), and solves the problem.
> 
> Then, the user who is building stuff, just needs to call all configure scripts
> with that argument (a thing that can be easily done from the packaging system)
> and the burden of setting up the environment by the user has gone awya.

I guess I don't understand why setting an environment variable at 
startup is a burden on the user. On Linux there are often things like 
/etc/profile.d directories which just contain files that are sourced 
into the environment at startup so package managers can drop files in 
there to add stuff to the environment. Is there no equivalent on NetBSD? 
If not, would it not be wiser to simply add it rather than rev the spec, 
modify all the programs etc.

thanks -mike