Installing files in /etc

["Wesley W. Terpstra" <terpstra@javien.com>]

I've being packaging a program which has a config file. The program uses
autoconf and all the ${bindir}, ${libdir}, etc. type variables. dh_make
produced a debian/rules that worked almost right out of the box b/c it
overloaded the prefix value to specify destinations for the install target.

However, ${sysconfdir} is ${prefix}/etc which means using that would place
config files into /usr/etc. I assume that autoconf doesn't provide a
variable for /etc b/c it is the same on all UNIXs. However, just installing
straight to /etc would not work with debuild.

My only thoughts are an evil hack where I edit debian/rules to have
$(MAKE) install prefix=`pwd`/debian/tmp/usr etcdir=`pwd`/debian/tmp/etc
and then use ${etcdir} for the config file install directory with it
defaulting to /etc in the Makefile.in.

Modifying the Makefile.in and configure.in extensively are no problems since
the upstream maintainer sits right next to me. ;-) What's the correct
procedure?

Thanks.

-- 
Wesley W. Terpstra <terpstra@javien.com>
Javien Canada Inc. - Linux Developer