Website as CVS; installation

[Peter Williams <peter newton cx>]

I've got my personal copy of Balsa working with a complete
copy of the website, slightly modified to allow the developer
(the user won't want to mess with this) to specify the
installation prefix and HTML root of the website, allowing
us to mirror it easily... ie,

./configure --with-website=http://www.newton.cx/balsa \
            --with-website-prefix=/home/httpd/balsa

Okay, that doesn't actually *matter* a whole lot, but it's 
cool.

Part II:

We had this problem a while ago, and I forget its 
resolution: Balsa wants to install its icons into Gnome's
share directories, which users may not have write privileges
to. Ie, balsa configured with a prefix of $HOME will still
try to install balsa.desktop into something like 
/usr/share/gnome/desktop/Internet

<aside>
This is actually Gnome's fault, as its 
gnome_unconditional_foobar functions, which search for files
in the standard gnome locations, cannot search any prefix other
than that of the installed gnome, basically preventing the user
from making user-level installations. We could write a wrapper
for these functions so that Balsa can find our files, but other
apps won't know where to look.

Put another way, Gnome has lots of trouble with apps that
have a prefix other than that of Gnome, and this is going
to happen often.
</aside>

My idea was to add a --enable-system-install option, which
will install the files into the places that require root
access (assuming gnome is system installed); otherwise, we
do not install those files, and use a wrapper to find our
images. This sucks, but I can think of no better solution
until gnome can deal with differently-prefixed programs.

Other ideas?

==============================
Peter Williams peter@newton.cx
"AIIEEEEEEEEE!!! DEATH ANTS!!"