Relocatability of packages

[James Henstridge <james daa com au>]

After listenning to all the talk about relocating binaries, I had a few
ideas.

Currently, with a lot of GNOME programs, there is only one part of the
program that relies on absolute paths.  That is the call to
bindtextdomain, which usually passes in a directory name taken from the
makefile.

Most other program files are (should be?) found using the function calls
in libgnome/gnome-util.h.  If we defined an extra function to libgnome
(maybe called gnome_locale_dir()), the call to bindtextdomain could be
changed to:
  bindtextdomain(PACKAGE, gnome_locale_dir())

With this change, dynamically linked binaries could be put in relocatable
packages and installed to where ever a particular systems gnome
installation is.

This means that only the gnome-libs package would be non relocatable.  We
could then make gnome-libs relocatable by getting it to find its install
prefix by looking at a file in /etc.

What do others think of this?

James Henstridge.

--
Email: james@daa.com.au
WWW:   http://www.daa.com.au/~james/