Hi, Every so often people pop up and give us (the autopackage team) flak for using a default install path of /usr instead of /usr/local. The reasoning is that as RPM and friends don't check to see if the software they're installing already exists on the filesystem, it's possible for a user to install some program (say Inkscape, or AbiWord) from the upstream autopackage and then install an RPM over the top by accident, for instance by doing a group install, or if the application is resolved as part of some other dependency (deps on applications are bizarre in my mind, but they do happen ...) This set of problems could be traded for an entirely different set (on Fedora at least) if /usr/local was fully supported. Currently there are lots of ways in which software installed here is a second class citizen. These problems affect source code installs too as most configure scripts default to /usr/local. Here are a few I noticed a while back - apologies if these have changed in rawhide or if I am misremembering: * /etc/ld.so.conf doesn't include /usr/local/lib * /etc/xdg/menus/applications.menu doesn't merge /usr/local/share/applications [bug #117671] * $XDG_DATA_DIRS doesn't include /usr/local/share * $BONOBO_ACTIVATION_PATH doesn't include /usr/local/lib/bonobo/servers * $KDEDIRS doesn't include /usr/local * $PKG_CONFIG_PATH doesn't include /usr/lib/pkgconfig * DBUS configuration file does not <includedir> /usr/local/etc/dbus-1/system.d * fontconfig doesn't have a <dir> element for /usr/local/share/fonts * Actually I'm not even sure regular $PATH includes /usr/local/bin, but maybe that was some other distro ... And at least one weird oddity: * Info looks in /usr/share/info and /usr/local/info. Is it top level or not? I think there are some more I missed. I filed a bug for the menu entries long ago as this is the most visible thing that breaks when we install out of /usr but I guess for obvious reasons I didn't bother filing bugs for all of them. There are just too many and there's bound to be some I forget or miss out. As this is a policy issue that touches many packages, I think maybe a better solution would be for the owner of each package to take a 2-minute break and think "Does my package have a $FOO_DIR or <include>foo</include> type configuration option? If so, should it include /usr/local?" and then just go in and fix it. The issues are normally with config files, startup scripts and so on anyway. I know I shouldn't really make requests without patches, but in most cases it'd be faster for the relevant maintainer to just add the line themselves than read a patch then apply it. Does anybody have any objections to doing this? If not, what is the best thing for me to do - file a single bug and just CC the maintainers of any affected packages I can think of? thanks -mike -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
