Re: configure scripts and packaging (gconf, scrollkeeper, etc)

[Mark McLoughlin <markmc redhat com>]

On Wed, 2005-02-02 at 10:48 +0100, Jan de Groot wrote:
> When packaging gnome stuff with make DESTDIR=$somedir/pkg install, many
> packages are updating my scrollkeeper database, installing a mime
> database, updating my freedesktop.org desktop-database specs, register
> gconf schema files, etc on my local system.
> Almost every package has a --disable-schemas-install option, but half of
> them are hardly working, because the conditional is set in the
> Makefiles, but never used after that.

	Send patches for the packages that ignore the Makefile conditional. The
ones that don't have the configure option just need AM_GCONF_SOURCE_2 in
their configure.in.

	In Fedora, we just use $GCONF_DISABLE_MAKEFILE_SCHEMA_INSTALL instead
of --disable-schemas-install.

> Another thing is the scrollkeeper database: there is no option to
> disable scrollkeeper database generation, which results in a nice and
> shiny updated scrollkeeper database on your host system, or with gnome
> source tarballs updated with new automake, a nice and shiny scrollkeeper
> database included in your package. Currently I wreck out the
> scrollkeeper things with some find and sed functions from the
> Makefile.in before I run ./configure.

	We do:

rm -rf $RPM_BUILD_ROOT%{_localstatedir}/scrollkeeper

	and then run scrollkeeper-update in the post install script.

	A nicer way of doing this wouldn't be hard to implement with a bit of
scrollkeeper hacking.

> Same as for update-mime-database and update-desktop-database: I have to
> define the variable to /bin/true to skip generation on packages that do
> generate these databases. I have only seen one or two packages that
> allow to disable the database stuff.

	Yeah, seems like no-one has addressed this issue either yet. In Fedora
we're doing the same trick as with scrollkeeper.

> It would be nice to have consistency across the gnome buildscripts used
> in the various source tarballs, the current stuff is not foolproof as it
> is now.

	It would indeed be nice, perhaps a single environment variable like
GCONF_DISABLE_MAKEFILE_SCHEMA_INSTALL which gconftool-2,
scrollkeeper-update, update-desktop-database etc. would all key off?

Cheers,
Mark.