Re: Can we install a gtk program without root privileges?

[Michael Torrie <torriem gmail com>]

On 12/01/2016 08:49 AM, Stefan Salewski wrote:
> My Nim editor https://github.com/ngtk3/NEd can be launced from the
> directory with the binary by typing
>
> ./ned file.nim
>
> For testing that is fine. But to make it work from an arbitrary
> directory something like
>
> # And for making gsettings available system wide one method is, as root
> # https://developer.gnome.org/gio/stable/glib-compile-schemas.html
> # echo $XDG_DATA_DIRS
> # /usr/share/gnome:/usr/local/share:/usr/share:/usr/share/gdm
> # cd /usr/local/share/glib-2.0/schemas
> # cp org.gtk.ned.gschema.xml .
> # glib-compile-schemas .
> #
>
> # as root
> cp nimdark1.xml /usr/share/gtksourceview-3.0/styles/
> cp nim.lang /usr/share/gtksourceview-3.0/language-specs/
>
> is necessary as described in the doc. That is fine for myself, but I
> can understand that other people fear to damage their system when doing
> root actions.
>
> Problem seems to be the gsettings path and additional the gtksourceview
> directories. May there exist a way to make it work at least on Linux
> without root privileges?

According to the gtksourceview docs you can use a local directory for
the specs and styles:

$HOME/.local/share/gtksourceview-3.0/

Presumably on Unix machines.  I would hazard a guess that there is also
probably an environment variable that gtksourceview could look at to
specify a custom directory so you could make up your own search path.

On Windows, if GTK still behaves as it used to, you can place everything
relative to the GTK dlls' path.  So you'd end up with a folder with your
EXE in it, along with the DLLs, and then the lib and share folders
inside of that folder, where you'd place things that'd normally be in /usr.