Re: Relocatability of packages

[David Jeske <jeske home chat net>]

On Thu, Sep 24, 1998 at 12:38:06PM +0800, James Henstridge wrote:
> After listenning to all the talk about relocating binaries, I had a few
> ideas.
> 
> Currently, with a lot of GNOME programs, there is only one part of the
> program that relies on absolute paths.  That is the call to
> bindtextdomain, which usually passes in a directory name taken from the
> makefile.

Sounds great.

> Most other program files are (should be?) found using the function calls
> in libgnome/gnome-util.h.  If we defined an extra function to libgnome
> (maybe called gnome_locale_dir()), the call to bindtextdomain could be
> changed to:
>   bindtextdomain(PACKAGE, gnome_locale_dir())

Sounds great. If there are wholes where programs depend on install
locations in other ways, the most assured way to find them is to
cement the app-wrapper standard, get a file manager to support it, and
let people start installing apps in whatever directory they like. The
problems will turn up quick. :)

How is gnome_locale_dir() going to find the install location? The best
method is probably the magic that emacs uses to find the full path of
it's application binary, and then walk up from there (which I think
mostly works on all platforms).

> With this change, dynamically linked binaries could be put in relocatable
> packages and installed to where ever a particular systems gnome
> installation is.
> 
> This means that only the gnome-libs package would be non relocatable.  We
> could then make gnome-libs relocatable by getting it to find its install
> prefix by looking at a file in /etc.
> 
> What do others think of this?

This sounds like a great idea. I'll be very happy the day I can
install an app in the directory I choose and have it actually work.

-- 
David Jeske (N9LCA) + http://www.chat.net/~jeske/ + jeske@chat.net