Re: [Evolution-hackers] installing evolution-data-server fails on a FHS compliant system

[Rodney Dawes <dobey novell com>]

On Mon, 2005-05-30 at 07:20 +0530, Not Zed wrote: 
> On Sun, 2005-05-29 at 17:27 +0200, Christian Krause wrote:
> > Hi Rodney,
> > 
> > On 5/24/05, Rodney Dawes <dobey novell com> wrote:
> > > >From the FHS:
> > > 
> > > Applications may use a single subdirectory under /usr/lib. If an
> > > application uses a subdirectory, all architecture-dependent data
> > > exclusively used by the application must be placed within that
> > > subdirectory.
> > > 
> > > This means that to be FHS-compliant, you need to specify the
> > > evolution-$BASE_VERSION subfolder to $libdir for the --libexecdir
> > > argument to configure. This is what we do in SUSE for
> > > evolution-data-server.
> > 
> > Yes, you are correct. The best way to get eds FHS-compliant installed
> > is to set the libexecdir to /usr/lib/evolution-data-server-1.2.
> > 
> > But I do still vote to do some tweaks inside e-d-s to let it compile
> > and install correctly even on a FHS-compliant system (where libexecdir
> > is the same as libdir) without additional configure options. Here are
> > my arguments:
> 
> I wonder why they did that, its kind of stupid really.  Libs should only
> contain, well, libraries.
> 
> Unless the servers are supposed to go somewhere else, like sbin.

No. The problem is that the FHS doesn't say anything about libexec. So,
everyone decided that it was not FHS-compliant to have "libexec", and
thus, everything must be put into "lib". Yeah, it is kind of stupid.
People should really be setting libexecdir to something other than
libdir when building things anyway. Perhaps to $libdir/exec or
something. And patch their autotools packages to default to something
like that, so as to cause less problems. Users who are going to build
this stuff themselves probably aren't going to pass every argument to
configure anyway. They are going to do ./configure; make; make install.
I'm surprised that nobody's complained until now with these practices.

> > - nearly all distributions are FHS compliant right now
> > - many distributions have to do some extra stuff (e.g. setting
> > libexecdir, apply patches, ...) to let eds install correctly
> > - some people who compiling e-d-s from scratch and have a
> > FHS-compliant system will suffer from this bug (searching the problem
> > why e-d-s is not running, thinking over a solution, ...)
> > 
> > Because of this it would be really nice if eds could be compiled
> > without any changes or additional options.
> 
> Why aren't we just using ${prefix}/lib/evolution-data-server/1.2/
> anyway, like we do with evolution?

I don't know. The correct thing to do would be not change the e-d-s
server binary install, and to change the backend bits to work this way,
though.

-- dobey