Gentoo's prosody has unusual locations

[Shibotto]

Hi everyone. I just installed prosody on my new Gentoo and while I was importing my old config I noticed it defaults to some odd paths:

• /etc/jabber instead of /etc/prosody for configs
  
• /var/spool/jabber instead of /var/lib/prosody for data

It's different from every other distro I tried and I was wondering what's the rationale behind this choice. /var/spool in particular sounds really wrong to me.

[miket]

I havn't used Prosody, but I did use ejabberd many years ago on an old, dead machine from which I recovered the filesystem that I still keep on line. Ejabberd also used /etc/jabber/ and /var/spool/jabber. While the /etc/jabber directory had package-specific files like ejabberd.cfg, the /var/spool/jabber directory has a lot of files I guess that the maintainer hoped would be the same across the various Jabber daemons.

I would not share the maintainer's confidence that, say, ejabberd and prosody could both use a share like /var/spool/jabber/roster.DCD without conflict. I kind of get that the he would want to set it up so that all Jabber daemons use the same set of directories, but surely that could make for problems if you wanted to replace one daemon for another.

Here's an example from a different kind of server daemon. If you wanted to switch from Apache to nginx, you'd continue to serve documents from /var/www/. The two packages, however, use their own separate /etc directories for configuration!

Jabber doesn't have standardized files to serve like a web server does, so it would sure seem to be better to use package specific directories.

Fortunately, there's a way out! I notice that the ebuilds define the environment variables JABBER_ETC and JABBER_SPOOL. These are the variables which supply the directory names you find problematic. The ebuild for ejabber defines these two also--when the same directory names as values!

The quick and dirty way to override these is to specify the environment variables on the Portage command line, like this: