/usr/local support

Damjan Jovanovic damjan.jov at gmail.com
Tue Mar 25 01:24:19 PDT 2008


On Sun, Mar 23, 2008 at 6:43 PM, Tollef Fog Heen <tfheen at err.no> wrote:
> * "Damjan Jovanovic"
>
>
>  | On Jan 31, 2008 3:45 AM, Tollef Fog Heen <tfheen at err.no> wrote:
>  | > * "Damjan Jovanovic"
>  | >
>  | > | It's winter now and I see the latest pkg-config still doesn't have my patch...
>  | >
>  | > Sorry, it got lost in the abyss of my mailbox.  A conceptually similar
>  | > patch has been applied now where it adds /usr/lib/pkgconfig and
>  | > /usr/share/pkgconfig if prefix is unset.
>  |
>  | Actually I was trying to add support for /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig and
>  | /usr/local/share/pkgconfig, which that patch still doesn't do.
>
>  That should be the default, since it will then have a default prefix
>  of /usr/local.  I guess you could argue that if you do ./configure
>  --prefix=/usr it should look in /usr/local too, but I'm not entirely
>  convinced that is a good idea.  If you believe otherwise, please do
>  feel free to try to convince me.

Firstly, the installation prefix, and the path where you look for .pc
files, should be 2 separate things. You could want to be installed in
one place but only look in another. Using --prefix to guess where to
search seems broken to me.

Secondly, third party software and most software compiled from source
goes into /usr/local. Whenever you search /usr for .pc files, you must
search /usr/local as well, otherwise you will miss some software.

Thirdly, you are an fd.o project, and should adhere to the XDG
directories spec, which requires you to support /usr/local (among
others).

>  --
>
>
> Tollef Fog Heen
>  UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are
>

Bye
Damjan


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