Re: GNUstep.sh / env sanity patches

[John Davidorff Pell]

On 17 Aug 2004, at 23:22, Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:

> On 18 Aug 2004, at 02:50, John Davidorff Pell wrote:
>
> > If GNUstep-installation-one is installed in /usr/local/GNUstep1 and 
> > GNUstep-installation-two is installed in /usr/local/GNUstep2, then we 
> > need some way of telling one that its in one directory, and the other 
> > in the other, hence the need for a specifiable GNUsteprc, right? 
> > Actually, i would expect that installation one should have hard coded 
> > into it where it lives, since it cannot be easily relocated anyway. 
> > This should solve some of the requirements for a GNUsteprc.
>
> I'm very strongly against having a fixed location which cannot be 
> overridden hardcoded into GNUstep.  I want to be able to produce a 
> binary software distribution that I can give to a customer on a cd-rom 
> and tell them to install it and run it wherever they like on their 
> machine.

You're talking about a relocatable install.

> > I think that all such requirements can be fixed this way. If I want 
> > to run myTool with GNUstep2 instead of GNUstep1, then I should run 
> > /usr/local/GNUstep2/{System,Local,Network}/Tools/myTool anyway, 
> > right?
>
> Then you have had to compile two separate versions ... twice as much 
> work.  What you should be able to do is take a single binary 
> distribution and simply unpack into the location you want it.  Then 
> users of each installation just need to have an environment variable 
> set to say which installation they are using.
>
> This is not important for most people, but it *is* important if you 
> need to roll out binary distributions to customers.  If you make a 
> software release which has dependencies on features of a recent 
> GNUstep, you need to distribute the GNUstep system as part of the 
> release.  You can't ask your customers to grab the latest GNUstep from 
> CVS, and build it with their own local configuration options before 
> they can install/use the new release.

True, but you need a relocatable install. In this case it would make 
sense for all the GNUstep stuff to use relative paths from where they 
are being run from, so when you run .../Tools/mytool it will know that 
../Library/Frameworks is where the libraries are. This way, no 
extra-GNUstep system conf file is needed. It also relieves the user 
from having to install the conf file and edit it based on where they 
unrolled the binary dist (unless its done automatically which might 
clobber a user-installed GNUstep which depends on the file).

It might be wise to have some init-like method run at the beginning of 
every app that's linked to -base so that all apps run after that 
inherit appropriate LD_* vars. This means that when GWorkspace.app 
launches apps, they work as expected, as well as an app run from the 
command line will pass on proper vars to its children.

$0.02

JP


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