Re: Relocatability of packages

[David Jeske <jeske home chat net>]

On Thu, Sep 24, 1998 at 01:20:48PM -0500, Miguel de Icaza wrote:
> 
> > How is gnome_locale_dir() going to find the install location? The best
> > method is probably the magic that emacs uses to find the full path of
> > it's application binary, and then walk up from there (which I think
> > mostly works on all platforms).
> 
> It should do what the other file-locating routines in GNOME do: it
> uses the GNOMEDIR environment variable and if this is not set, then it
> uses th compiled-in default.

Perhaps this went off on a tangent I'm not aware of, however, in my
mind the idea of "relocatability of packages" was to allow the
application to be relocated by the user. I.e. if I was using "Balsa" I
could instll it anywhere and it would still be able to find Gnome, and
it would still be able to find it's local datafiles.

I don't see how what you say above is going to allow that.

When I think of relocatility of packages I think of getting rid of this:

/usr/local/bin/balsa
/usr/local/bin/wmprefs
/usr/local/balsa/balsa.ico
/usr/local/wmprefs.app/<stuff>

and moving to this:

<anypath>/balsa.app/balsa
                   /balsa.ico
<anypath>/wmprefs.app/wmprefs
                     /wmprefs.ico

Where <anypath> might be "/usr/local/bin" or it might be
"/home/jeske/apps" or it might be "/nfs/foo/bar/".

-- 
David Jeske (N9LCA) + http://www.chat.net/~jeske/ + jeske@chat.net