Re: Relocatability of packages

[The Doctor What <docwhat gerf org>]

On Thu, Sep 24, 1998 at 09:22:28PM -0400, Tim Moore wrote:

<David Jeske's comments on using a NeXTSTEP/GNUSTEP approach snipped>

> OK, that makes sense. But I don't like this hard separation between gui
> and non-gui. What if I want my package to have GUI *and* CLUI tools? Or if
> I want my one program to be usable in both modes? I don't think the GNOME
> project intends to deprecate the command-line as much as NS did, and I
> think that there's more of a portability concern, too. 

I have a couple thoughts in addition to David Jeske's comment that we
should probably be steering away from CLUI (at least I think it was David
Jeske's comment) for GNOME.

If an application has a CLUI in addition to a GUI verion, then the GUI
version should be placed in something like this .app solution.  The CLUI
should either:
a) stand alone, and can therefore be installed in /usr/local/bin or /usr/local/encap... 
b) or should be stand alone, but use enough GNOME libraries to find the
GUI portion (.app, for example) and get any non-mutable information from
there.

This would be the best solution, but I'd rather see if it's possible to
modify the linux program loader to understand that if the program trying
to be run ends in <file>.app and is a directory, then it should run the file
<file>.i386 or whatever the architecture is under that <file>.app
directory.

I'm afraid that the current methods of installing applications is
irritating and the NeXTSTEP looks to be the best I've seen.  RPM and DPKG
are nice, but they only handle basic situations.

If we could get this unified, especially cross platform (i.e. sparc,
dec-unix, etc), that'd be great.  Perhaps a GNUSTEP subgroup could be
formed to write up the standards for this and to impliment example code...

Ciao!
	docwhat@gerf.org