Re: Namespacing issues ...

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs eazel com>]

Michael Meeks <michael helixcode com> writes:

> 	They can call them all 'ls' and put them in /opt/ms/softimage/ for
> all I care.
> 
> 	What I do care about is that the poor ISV needs to install his
> oafinfo file ( with his custom path to his binary coded into it ) in a
> standard place, without fiddling with any tedious environment variables [
> which is a non-solution ].
> 
> 	So; the ISV installs his 'ls' binary [ a new Nautilus component
> using zvt + ls ] in /opt/ms/abc/ls, he then installs his oafinfo file in a
> standard; well namespaces location:
> 
> 	/usr/share/oaf/com/sillycompany/ls.oafinfo
> 

That violates the FHS. According to the FHS, third-party packages
should never install anything in /usr, they should install in
/opt/whatever; Only distribution-provided packages are supposed to
install in /usr. The LSB, the ABI standard that third-party vendors
are going to be writing to, will incorporate the FHS.

So we need to focus on making sure installing in /opt/whatever works
welld, instead of recommending a practice contrary to the FHS.

> 	And bang; everything just works, no daemon restarting, no pain, no
> effort, _no_ possibility of conflict, no massive '-' delimited filenames.

The ability to restart the daemon cleanly is clearly a required
feature for GNOME 1.4, for this and other reasons; I just filed a bug
on it.  (http://bugzilla.eazel.com/show_bug.cgi?id=4806).

In addition to OAF_INFO_PATH, the daemon reads a config file in /etc
for it's path which can be modified cleanly by a provided program. So
I will also add monitoring of this file to oafd, so that it can reread
it when it changes and reload the oafinfo files as
appropriate. (http://bugzilla.eazel.com/show_bug.cgi?id=4807)

That means all you will have to do is call the program to tweak this
config file in your rpm postinstall script and everything is peachy.

Thanks for making sure this design issue gets addressed.

 - Maciej