Menu spec update (summary; closure?)

[Lennon Cook]

On 3/24/06, Waldo Bastian <bastian at kde.org> 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