On 3/24/06, Waldo Bastian <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Just like #3, the application could install all its files within its own > prefix. I tend to think that this is the best idea. If the user has specified a directory where a particular app should install, it should /not/ install any files outside of that directory unless it is specificly told to. Ensuring that its files are able to be located by the system should be a sysadmin concern, rather than a third-party one. To my mind, an installer should completely ignore XDG_*_DIRS, but should not have things hard-coded to be under /usr - that is, the spec should not say 'put this somewhere in /usr', incase the rest of hte package is being installed under /opt/Foo .
>The tool could probably symlink the files > into /usr/share/applications with the option to use other locations at the > discretion of the distributor. Leave decisions like this to the user/sysadmin/distro. What happens if, for whatever reason, the sysadmin doesn't want a particular app's files to be in the various paths? The installer has no way of knowing this. The policy of how to include a particular file in XDG_*_DIRS directly affects this, and so should be an admin concern. The XDG_*_DIRS_INSTALL idea is also decent (and, eg, the autotools already support similar things by different names), but I think it incredibly important that the defaults if these are not set should never be hard-coded to anywhere that is potentially outside of the install prefix. The more a spec interferes with admin decisions, the less chance there is of it being seriously adopted. I have a major problem with Jeremy White's point 3 - "the assertion that ISVs should not be writing any files to /usr" - in that the sysadmin might tell it to do /precisely that/ . Also, on a particular system, it may be preferable to write to /usr than to /usr/local. A spec overriding the sysadmins choice in this would be doubleplusungood. -- Lennon Victor Cook "He who receives an idea from me receives without lessening, as he who lights his candle at mine receives light without darkening" - Thomas Jefferson _______________________________________________ xdg mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg
