Re: spatial stuff detail

[Shaun McCance <shaunm wolfram com>]

On Tue, 2003-09-23 at 07:15, Guido Schimmels wrote:
> I'm not the blind talking about color. I've packaged ca. 150 mostly  
> Gnome based apps as appdirs. And most of them __relocatable__ no less.  
> Meaning you can drop them anywhere you please on your HD, like your  
> home dir if you have no root privileges. Of course due to the hackish  
> ad-hoc approach most Gnome apps take to resource finding, I had to  
> modify the sources to overcome the Unix-head hard-wiring madness.
> Notable exceptions are GIMP and Abiword which are cleanly programmed.
> KDE has library calls for resource finding so KDE apps are relocatable  
> out of the box, unless the programmer does something stupid.

My impression is that appdirs make working with any sort of central
registry of anything very difficult.  Applications need to do things
like registering their documentation with ScrollKeeper and installing
schemas for their GConf keys.  Not to mention that these things should
all be in my path so I can call them from a terminal.

OS X doesn't have a central help system or a central configuration
system, and they don't put get the applications in the path, so we
clearly can't look to them for solutions.  How did you handle these
sorts of things?

--
Shaun