Re: gnome-lib and Solaris 7x86

["Ben Taylor" <sol7x86 hotmail com>]

> To Ben,
>
> I will start out by thanking you for your work. As a person who
> volunteers to help others you deserve thanks and not flack.
>
> I do not mean to send you flack. Hopefully just my own opinion and
> no more.

Thanks. Sorry for sounding a bit ruffled.

> Experienced and not experienced admins have to do this all the time.
> My point is that neither Sun or HP or others that use /opt began as
> ever seeming to mean it for any other purposes than optional
> software which was purchased from them. When Solaris first came out
> every one I know at Sun advised to continue to use /usr/local and
> they also continued them selves. So, most of us kept using
> /usr/local. Since then, both Sun and HP have gone to using /opt
> for much more. Some what late in history; because a very much
> larger community is now using /usr/local than is now using /opt.

/usr/local is a default.  Just because I do Solaris and observe the
"file system standards for Solaris", doesn't mean that everyone else
should use /opt.  It doesn't make sense when all that has already been
defined for the free OS's like Linux and *BSD.  The fact that folks
using HP and Sun haven't migrated from /usr/local to /opt is probably
due in fact that folks walk into an environment already setup. To
take an existing environment and convert it is exceptionally difficult, but 
not impossible.  I've done it, but it ain't fun.
When I started building GNOME on Solaris/X86, I had a brand new
system.

> > And for having a choice, you can put it anywhere you want as long
> > as you symlink the directory you want it to load in to the actual
> > point it will be loaded in.  That way you get what you want where
> > you want it, and all the package can follow the run-time linker
> > paths (not requiring a LD_LIBRARY_PATH).  I set it to a static location 
> so I
> > don't have to answer questions when people screwup
> > there LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
>
> I will not say that what you are doing is wrong. I do not use
> you distribution so I have no problem with it.
>
> I just like /opt for things that I buy from Sun or HP and /usr/local >for 
> all else. I would not expect you or anyone else to change for >what I like. 
> I do usually find most who do such development are open >to to other's 
> opinions. I should have said "I prefer to always have a >choice".

I can understand your desire to put it where you want to.  However,
with the LD_LIBRARY_PATH issue in solaris, and much more customizations 
required to do "choose where you want this", I'm
more interested in producing a package that is easy to build and
distribute.

If you really want to change a directory software loads in, chances
are that if you symlink to directory it will load in, to where you
want to, the package will honor the symlink and install it where
you want to.  When I first did my packages, it did not honor that and
so I rebuilt the packages so people could indeed change the location
by just adding a symlink.

Ben

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