Wookey wrote:
The debian packages solve this by having a concept of 'config' files. These are special files, which if they get overwritten on install (and have been changed since last time), then the installer asks if you want to use the old ones, the new ones, look at the differences etc.
rpm does something similar; the installer adds .rpmnew to the new config file and informs the user.
For a plain make install, I'm not sure what the normal thing is - I expect just overwriting the old ones is normal.
Package management systems have an advantage over make install, in that they know whether the old config file has been altered by the user or not. If not they can just update it. Many (most?) source packages don't explicitly copy config files anywhere on make install, but have template versions in the tarball. Users building/upgrading from source can decide what to do. Builders of binary packages can include them using their package managers features. Either way, make install shouldn't be installing files in ~/. If you do install .ini files put them in /etc/. The user running make install may not be the user running the application (in fact will probably be root). John