I found it useful to generalize .local

[Michael Thayer]

On Mon, 2011-04-11 at 12:08 +0200, Damjan Jovanovic wrote:
> Most *nix applications hardcode their installation prefix at compile
> time, so you'd have to have exactly the same $HOME as the account
> under which an RPM was compiled for that to work.
> 
> This is not an issue that can really be fixed portably: argv[0] is
> unreliable, POSIX has no API like GetModuleHandle() and
> GetModulePath() on Windows, /proc/self/exe is Linux-only and can only
> be used for application, while searching the lines in /proc/self/maps
> for an internal symbol is the only method available to a library to
> discover its own path, only works on Linux, and is obscure and unknown
> to the vast majority of developers.
Convention says that argv[0] should point to the executable.  If you are
going to modify an application anyway to support runtime prefix
discovery why not just make that a requirement (maybe with a default
path as a fallback) and let it be the caller's problem if they don't set
argv[0] as they should.  (Let's not discuss setuid here!)

Regards,

Michael
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