Figured I should throw my 2-cents in...
On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 8:05 AM, Richard Frith-Macdonald
<address@hidden> wrote:
Incidentally, it's perhaps a subtle distinction, but I've no desire to make FHS the default layout, what I want is to make the native filesystem layout default.
The important thing is that things should just work for the naive user who installs from source ... the loader should find their shared libraries, their 'man' command should find the manual pages, their shell should find the executables etc.
I agree with this statement. It's a fact that GNUstep doesn't play well with the FHS used by, pretty much, every single *nix variant. Sourcing GNUstep.sh is fine, but it's not ideal, I consider it a work around. It simply adds the GNUstep filesystem layout to the appropriate env variables, and there's no reason why GNUstep and applications shouldn't be installed in the default locations.
Well then, the packagers come close to being in my category (4) then ... GNUstep should have a native setup for them so that the packages they produce will just work for the end users.
Actually, I don't think that's ideal either ... we should assist packagers to produce better packages ... and contribute filesystem layout configurations for their systems to gnustep-make, and contribute installation scripts to the packages.
It's not good for GNUstep if packagers produce packages which install and then don't work.
Back when I was somewhat maintaining the SlackBuild scripts for GNUstep I simply passed --with-filesystem-layout=fhs. Again, this is fine but I still just consider it a work around. Like Richard, I think GNUstep should be installed where to the native layout to begin with.
>> If not, do you have a suggestion for a better way to improve the chances of GNUstep working for this fourth group.
>
> Maybe by adding this to the end of -make's install?
>
> echo source ${GNUSTEP_MAKEFILES}/GNUstep.sh >> /etc/profile
> echo source ${GNUSTEP_MAKEFILES}/GNUstep.csh >> /etc/csh.cshrc
Sure, we've discussed that kind of thing before and there was a strong argument that editing such files is intrusive, and system dependent since the appropriate files vary, and generally somewhat complex (you need to remove old edits before making a new one) and error-prone. I'm sure we could do it, but using native conventions seems simpler so far.
That solution is just wrong. There's no reason why system files should be touched when installing a piece of software. Bash uses the /etc/profile.d/ directory and if you're going to do something like what is being proposed, a file should be added to that dir instead of appending /etc/profile directly. In any case, this is, again, is just a work around to the actual problem.
I don't use GNUstep in Windows, so I can't comment much there, but as far as I know we don't use the native file system layout there, anyway. Msys/MinGW provide a FHS-like filesystem for GNUstep to use and we do exactly the same work arounds there as we do under the *nix variants (sourcing GNUstep.sh). For a truely native layout applications would have to be installed in c:\Program Files\
Stef