Re: Proposal: an addition to glib for getting the absolute path of the current binary.

[James Henstridge <james daa com au>]

Sven Neumann wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I am not convinced that locating the binary file does solve the
> problem of locating the data and configuration files. Is there a
> reliable way to determine these directories when the path of the
> executable is known? I don't think so. The software might have been
> compiled with --datadir set to something completely unrelated. Same
> goes for configuration files.  It's common practise to call configure
> with --sysconfdir=/etc.  How is your proposal for relocatable packages
> going to deal with this?
>  
The simplest approach for this would be something like this:

  1. get the executable's path
  2. if the path for the executable matches the configure time
     defaults, use the configure time defaults for things like sysconfdir
  3. if the path doesn't match, assume that prefix is ".." relative to
     the executable's path, and datadir=$prefix/share, etc.

Does this sound workable?

James.

--
Email: james daa com au
WWW:   http://www.daa.com.au/~james/