basedir-spec issue

[Laszlo Peter]

On Sat, 2004-05-08 at 03:57, Thomas Leonard wrote:
> On Fri, May 07, 2004 at 02:39:41PM +0100, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> [...]
> > 	If you build the entire desktop stack into a different prefix - e.g.
> > /gnome/head/INSTALL, and you have to set an environment variable to tell
> > the build where to find some files it has installed, then something is
> > wrong somewhere.
> > 
> > 	I also don't know of anything else that works this way
> 
> PATH, MANPATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, PKG_CONFIG_PATH off the top of my head,

Not sure about MANPATH, but pkg-config _does_ search
$libdir/pkgconfig, not /usr/lib/pkgconfig.
LD_LIBRARY_PATH is evil and is unnecessary if you set the
runpath correctly at build time. Which basically corresponds
to what I was asking for: adding the datadir to the default
search path at build time.

You don't set LD_LIBRARY_PATH for all users at login just because
your software something in /opt, do you?

> for a few environment variables you have to set when installing in /opt.
> Just set XDG_DATA_DIRS at the same time.
> 
> > - think of icon themes, for example, the icon theme lookup *will* always
> > first look in the prefix it was installed in.
> 
> If you relied upon that, you wouldn't be able to select such themes with
> ROX-Filer, so your file manager might use a different icon for directories
> to the rest of your desktop, which would be annoying (though not as
> serious as using a different MIME database, of course).

The proposal wasn't to replace /usr/share with $datadir only
to add it to the search path, preferably to the beginning.
Packages that install files to the standard locations will still
work as before.
If, say, I install my GNOME in /opt/gnome, but your app (rightly)
only searches /usr/share by default, the worst thing that
can happen is you still have to set XDG_DATA_DIRS or else
your app won't find my GNOME build. Why is that any worse
than where we are now?

Laca