Re: Absolute paths

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Peter Astrand <altic@lysator.liu.se> writes:
> (Has this topic already been discussed?)
> 
> IMHO, Unix applications should never have hard-coded file paths embedded
> into binaries. Thus, binaries should still work if you move them. 
> 
> It would be great if Gnome worked this way. The binaries for Solaris 2.7
> provided by HelixCode, for example, have /opt/gnome hardcoded, and this is
> not where I want to / can install Gnome. I'd like to run:
> 
> rpm -vhi <gnome RPMS> --prefix=/usr/local/gnome
> 
> , for example, but as far as I understand, this is not possible. Can this
> be fixed? 
> 

It has been discussed. Conclusion: yes we would love the feature, but
we have no real idea how to implement it.

Applications must be able to find support files (images,
documentation, configuration, etc.).

There are two ways to do it:
 - use the path that was given to configure at compile time
 - allow the user to set an environment variable or edit a 
   config file setting a new path

The second can be supported in addition to the first, but it won't
allow transparent RPM relocation, you'll still need to do the config
file editing.

If you have other suggestions for how to address the issue of finding
support files, please do post them - it's an issue that would be nice
to solve.

Havoc