When installing binaries and data files for a game, what are the
recommended practices? The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard[1] (and
traditional practice) suggests that game binaries should be installed
into /usr/local/games and data files in /usr/local/share/games. I am
wondering how to best achieve this with autoconf & automake.
Ingo Ruhnke's "Linux Games Install and Directory Guide"[2] suggests
using
pkgdatadir = $(datadir)/games/@PACKAGE@
in Makefile.am. It is certainly a simple solution (although it
doesn't address the location of binaries). Is this recommended?
Another question is how best to interact with user-specified
directories. If a user specifies --datadir as ~/data, is it intuitive
for the data to appear in ~/data/games/...? If not, how would I go
about detecting that the user specified datadir? By the same token,
is setting the default bindir to '${exec_prefix}/games' reasonable, or
is this another unintuitive result for the user (and again, how to
tell if the user has specified bindir - or even to set such a
default)?
Finally, is any of this really necessary? Although it is mentioned in
the FHS, the GNU standards don't appear to make any statement about
the location of games and game data. Do systems other than Linux tend
to make this distinction? If so, might it be a useful installation
directory variable for future versions of autoconf?
Thanks for your input,
Kevin
1. http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html
2. http://www.seul.org/~grumbel/tutorials/game_install/install_dirs.html
P.S. Please CC me as I am not currently subscribed.
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