How to determine modular paths?

[R.L. Horn]

On Fri, 17 Nov 2006, Andy Ritger wrote:

> If the command-line argument route is preferrable, that's fine with me.
> The particular mechanism for querying the modular paths doesn't matter
> to me, as long as there is a mechanism that is reliably present.
>
> Aaron Plattner was kind enough to code up two commandline options,
> "-showDefaultModulePath" and "-showDefaultLibPath", as functional
> equivalents to using pkg-config to query moduledir and libdir,
> respectively.  See attached.
>
> Please let me know if there are any objections to that approach.

No objections, but a couple of observations:

   Some distinction probably needs to be made between default values and 
any values altered by config files.  The defaults are hardcoded at build 
time and don't necessarily reflect the current state.

   Values returned by the server should be limited to those that the server 
otherwise "needs to know."  ModulePath and LibDir (which is to say 
lib/X11) are good examples.  The config search path would also be really 
nice.

   In other words, care should be taken to ensure that the server doesn't 
end up being the authority on things it doesn't really know about.  The 
locations of C headers and non-dlopened libraries, for example, would be 
inappropriate.