Re: Relocatability of packages

[David Jeske <jeske home chat net>]

On Thu, Sep 24, 1998 at 07:45:45PM -0400, Tim Moore wrote:
> On Thu, 24 Sep 1998, Scott Gifford wrote:
> > >So does that mean you have to put every *.app directory (which may be
> > >scattered around the system) in your path? Wouldn't building menus for the
> > >GNOMEprint and whatever be a big headache? And what about the separation
> > >of system-independent vs. system-dependent data?
> > 
> > 
> >   You could just symlink the parts a user would want to run into
> > /usr/local/bin, or some other directory like /usr/local/apps...
> 
> I was under the impression that the idea was to be able to move stuff
> around at will, so symlinks would break. And why is it better to symlink
> /usr/local/bin/foo to <some-random-prefix>/foo.app/foo than to just
> install foo into /user/local/bin in the first place? And that doesn't
> address the system-dependent vs. system-independent data problem.

It's not.

However, requiring an install in /usr/local/bin isn't a good solution,
because it forbids non-superusers from installing applications.

I contend that:
 1)  in a GUI environment it's not as important to command-line launch
     applications
 2)  there are solutions which will let us command line launch applications
     regardless of install location

For example, if you, on your personal machine, want to make links from
all the binaries to "/usr/local/bin", that's fine with me. I
personally won't do it. I personally don't install anything in
/usr/local/bin anyhow. I _currently_ install everything in
"/usr/local/encap/<appname>.<version>.encap/".

My suggestion is that we follow the nextstep model where all files
within the wrapper are non-mutable. System dependent data should be
stored in libprefs anyhow. (remember, this is just GUI apps)

Please go find my 'list of requirements' for app installation in my
other email and comment on it.

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