SpatialBundles

[Alexander Larsson]

On Thu, 2007-09-20 at 10:18 +0200, Luca Cappelletti wrote:

> 
>         Also, most apps are not relocatable, so it will be hard to
>         package them
>         like this. 
>         
> 
> May you point me, please, to an apps not relocable that seems to be
> hard to package into a SpatialBundles?
> I would like to understand and investigate better because I've
> successfully packaged: Opera qt shared, KOffice, Krita, Dolphin,
> Amarok, QTlibs, KDElibs, Wine, Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, GAIM,
> Enlightenment, Nautilus, gFTP, Jre6, jGNASH, Regina REXX, Xournal,
> Python, Galculator, Filezilla 3, Zope 3, and so I cannot understand
> the real limits until I do not reach them :) 
> All now just to assure me that it's good for general desktop
> applications (my main target).

Take nautilus for instance. Its in your list. It has code like:

	/* build the path name to the browser.xml file and load it */
	xml_path = g_build_filename (NAUTILUS_DATADIR, "browser.xml", NULL);
	if (xml_path) {
		browser_data = xmlParseFile (xml_path);
		g_free (xml_path);

Where NAUTILUS_DATADIR is expanded at build-time to
"$prefix/share/nautilus" ($prefix being defined by what you pass to
configure).

When you packaged nautilus. Did you locate all places like this and
convert them to some sort of bundle-relative filenames? How do you at
runtime know where the bundle is?

Relocatable packages are not impossible. Its just a lot of work.