[Clipart] Where to install?

[Matthew Gates]

On Tuesday 21 June 2005 20:45, you wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-06-21 at 11:34 +0000, Matthew Gates wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > There was recently a bug
> > https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3583 about getting an
> > OCAL ebuild for gentoo.  I'm willing to have a go at making and
> > submitting the ebuild.  Is there a standard place to put the OCAL
> > files?  I suspect something like /usr/share/ocal/.
>
> Yes, we have discussed this in the past. I'm discussing this on the
> chat channel right now.
>
> I think this solution is best. Use the following for all clipart on
> *nix. And then inside this have the different released packages and
> possible DMS repositories:
>
>     /usr/share/clipart
>
> Then after installing the 0.14 release of openclipart-0.14
>
>     /usr/share/clipart/openclipart-0.14
>
> This would allow for in the future:
>
>     /usr/share/clipart/openclipart-0.15
>
> Also, this would allow for other projects packages:
>
>     /usr/share/clipart/AnyPackage
>
> And, then for future DMS support:
>
>     /usr/share/clipart/dms
>
>
> So, then, what would the user path be:
>
> ~/.clipart/
>
> And then any packages would be like so:
>
> ~/.clipart/openclipart-0.14
>

I like the simplicity of this approach, but it's not clear how this would 
work on platforms that have alternative hierarchies - windows, OS X, and 
others like the more radical linux distros with their own directory 
layouts.  

> We could standardize upon this and then also make a basic Makefile to
> be included with our packages that would make install to these
> locations.
>
> Also, if we agreed upon this, we could set any future DMS clients to
> download to this location.
>
> This is a standard that should be shared amongst GIMP, Inkscape, other
> Gnome Apps, OO.o, Klipart, etc. Do you all agree? I don't think there
> is a standard for this. Thoughts?

If we can get the Gnome people interested then they might be able to have 
it trickle down to gnome and gtk based projects. 

> I just looked through my system and Abiword and Inkscape both have
> clipart under there own program folder name like this:
>
>
>     /usr/share/AbiSuite-2.2/clipart
>
>     /usr/local/share/inkscape/clipart
>

Exactly the sort of think that we want to avoid IMO.  I checked inkscape's 
configure script and the location of the clipart is not customisable 
there.  Maybe we could submit improved configure scripts for these 
projects that allow the clipart directory to be specified as an option at 
package configuration time?  For gentoo at least it would then be trivial 
to alter the ebuild to configure gentoo to use the /usr/share/clipart 
directory for these projects.

> > While wondering about it, I popped over to #openoffice.org on
> > freenode, and asked them how OOo "finds" clipart libraries, and they
> > said that there was a path in the OOo settings.  The thing is this
> > path is for places where OOo's own thumbnail and index files reside,
> > which at present can only be created by OOo itself.  See the contents
> > of this debian package for an example of the files that need to be
> > generated:
> > http://packages.debian.org/unstable/graphics/openclipart-openoffice.o
> >rg
> >
> > My guess is that other applications do something similar.  Wouldn't
> > it be better to define some sort of standard for how to locate /
> > parse clipart libraries, and modify applications / clipart libs to
> > conform to the standard?  I think yes (of course), but how might it
> > work - any ideas?
>
> Yes I agree. Well, we need to know more about OO.o and how it finds
> clipart and standard clip art paths
>
> > The simplest thing I can think of it to have an environment variable,
> > CLIPART_PATH, have clipart libraries regester their install locations
> > in it, and have applications look in it for places to find clipart. 
> > That leaves interpretting thumbnails / filtering supported file types
> > and such to the applications that use the variable, but it would be a
> > start.
>
> I think this is a great idea. This is something that needs to be
> standardized amongst graphics applications. We could set this using an
> included Makefile with our packages. Also, in the future, clients to
> DMS could set this as well.

I'm unsure of how system wide environment variables are modified by 
different distro.  Gentoo has a directory /etc/env.d into which makes it 
pretty simple to add environment variables (if I'm interpretting it's 
purpose correctly).  I other distros have different mechanisms, and in 
some it'll probably be necessary to modify /etc/profile or something 
(ugly - especially for un-installations).   Not that this is directly a 
problem for us - rather is is something those that take on package 
creation for those distros need to worry about.

>
> Overall, this is something we need to discuss with other projects that
> use Clip Art. Do you all agree?

Yes.  The question is - what forum is best?  Having some co-ordination 
between Gnome and KDE would be a good place to start.  I suppose this 
sort of thing is the realm of freedesktop.org?