Re: where are the files...

[Carlos Pereira <carlos pehoe civil ist utl pt>]

> > What is the right, elegant, safe, etc...
> > way to indicate my app where actually are
> > the help files that the app should read
> > when the user asks for help?
> >
> > Hardcoding the absolute file path, or just
> > a relative path doesn't look reasonable.

> setting it by ./configure is the right way, so the user can choose the
> $prefix

Thanks for your answer. Yes, autoconf and automake
are our friends. However, I am still in the shadows: 
in my C code, when I want to open a help file,
(to read help information and show it in a gtktext 
inside a gtk dialog) with, say, fopen (filename, "r");
what should I actually put in the filename string?

How to do this:
open_help_file_in_path_later_defined_by_configure?

I can ask my C code to look for the help files
in a path defined by an evironment variable
which will be subsequently defined by the 
configure script, according to --prefix,
or someother variable. Is that your suggestion? 
(I suspect it isn't...)

Even that seems less than safe, as I suppose
these days package managers tend to put documentation 
and executables in different places, for
example /usr/bin/app for executables
and /usr/doc/app for documentation.
The environment variable would have 
to point to the documentation path,
in case this is unrelated with the
executable path.

Adding symlinks in /usr/bin/local to app
executables makes the whole thing even more 
problematic.

Sorry, I am still confused, could you
clarify this a bit more for me?

Many thanks for your help,
Carlos