Re: [Gimp-developer] Any way to convince Gimp installed in a prefix to only use the plugins in the prefix?

[Elle Stone <ellestone ninedegreesbelow com>]

Recently I tried to update Gimp from git, which I've done quite a few 
times before without any problems. This time several things went wrong, 
the main symptom being that Gimp couldn't open a png file. I asked about 
the problem on IRC and several people came up with possible sources of 
the problem. Actually all the suggestions were correct! as there was 
more than one problem going on.

The most difficult issue to track down was related to libpng. I had 
recently updated Gentoo, which updated libpng. The updated Gimp was 
compiled using the new libpng. But when I tried to run Gimp, it used 
plugins from a previous installation (this is what took a long time to 
figure out), and of course those plugins were compiled using the old 
libpng library.

Tracking down exactly what was happening was not easy because I didn't 
realize that plugins were installed not only in the prefix but also in 
hidden home config folders.

Eventually I found and deleted the hidden home config folders and got 
Gimp in the first prefix properly installed, which created new hidden 
home config folders. Then I installed Gimp in a second prefix, and 
modified one of the plugins in the second prefix. But Gimp in the second 
prefix didn't see the modified plugin because it too was looking in the 
hidden home config folder, which it very politely didn't overwrite 
during the installation process.

I found the Preferences dialog for setting where to look for the various 
brushes, plugins, etc. That's a lot of folders to reset/reorder one by 
one! as the default order of where to look puts the hidden home config 
folder first.

So that is why I asked about convincing Gimp in a prefix to only use 
plugins installed in the prefix. Now that Mitch has fixed the 
"absolute/relative" path problem when using the configure option 
"--with-gimpdir=", each Gimp is only looking for plugins and etc in the 
specified folder inside the prefix. So that problem is solved, hopefully!

On 01/26/2014 03:15 PM, Michael Schumacher wrote:
> Am 24.01.2014 20:58, schrieb Elle Stone:
>
> > I usually have three or four separate installations of Gimp from git,
> > each in its own prefix.
> >
> > Is there a way to tell Gimp in a prefix to only use the plugins in its
> > own prefix, other than resetting the folder preferences every time I
> > want to switch prefixes?
>
> You could set the environment variable GIMP2_DIRECTORY to a different
> personal directory altogether, or set GIMP2_PLUGINDIR to point to a
> different plug-in location - see http://www.gimp.org/man/gimp.html#sect4
> for more information about these variables.
The info on the page you reference is very interesting and I'm really 
hoping that the configure option "--with-gimpdir=" sets all of these 
folders to only look in the prefix-specific directory:

GIMP2_DIRECTORY
    to get the name of the personal GIMP directory. If unset .gimp-2.6 
is used. If this is an absolute path, it is used as is. If it is a 
relative path, it is taken to be a subdirectory of the home directory.
GIMP2_DATADIR
    to get the base location for data files such as brushes and 
patterns. If unset /usr/share/gimp/2.0 is used.
GIMP2_LOCALEDIR
    to get the base location for translations. If unset 
/usr/share/locale is used.
GIMP2_PLUGINDIR
    to get the base location for plug-ins and modules. If unset 
/usr/lib64/gimp/2.0 is used.
GIMP2_SYSCONFDIR
    to get the location of configuration files. If unset /etc/gimp/2.0 
is used.