Finally the light dawned last night. I have tried to upgrade Gnome to 2.1x several times over the past six months and each time ran into missing icons or (the most frequent and annoying symptom) a broken address book that won't show my existing entries or allow me to add new ones.
Somehow a couple of weeks ago I got everything working with 2.12 except the Evolution icons that seem to come and go at random, and when someone mentioned a possible problem with my path I thought I'd take a closer look at the paths I use. Now, unlike the instructions in the book I don't type a full ./configure command every time. I have a standard bash script called gconfig for Gnome installations that sends all the standard config parameters - prefix, libexecdir, etc. - to .configure so I can just type gconfig && make on all 40 or 50 individual packages; I have the process streamlined to where I can install a whole new GTK/Gnome system in about four hours. When I looked at the paths from my last mostly-working installation I noticed that libexec was going to /usr/gnome/sbin, and I thought it's stupid to have yet another path for binaries that I have to add to my PATH environment, so I recompiled everything to put libexec files in /usr/gnome/bin . That's when I once again lost the use of my Evolution contacts. By replacing one program at a time from my working copy into my failed copy, I narrowed it down to those programs that launch child processes in the libexec directory. To make a long story short (too late!) what I finally realized after blowing the weekend on this project was that for whatever reason, Evolution (and possibly the Gnome panel) doesn't like having libexec processes in the /bin folder. This week I'll rebuild again putting libexec into some other location and see if that fixes the erratic behavior (the program's, not mine). Which leads me to my question for those who have had the patience to wade through my epic novel: Why did you (blfs authors) write the Gnome section so as to put the libexec functions in a separate directory (e.g., /usr/gnome/lib/gnome-applets, /usr/gnome/lib/bonobo, etc.) rather than just one big /usr/gnome/lib/libexec? -- Peter B. Steiger, learning my lesson about deviating from the recipe too much Cheyenne, WY -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
