Re: Tony Nugent's arguments about RH .spec files

Ethan (allanon@crystaltokyo.com)
Tue, 19 Jan 1999 15:42:22 -0800 (PST) 


On Tue, 19 Jan 1999, Andrew Sullivan wrote:

> On Tue, 19 Jan 1999, Michal Vitecek wrote:
> 
> >  anyway, it's not outr problem to bend down to lame
> >  RH newbies who can't find a file on their systems, providing there's a
> >  section about it in README or FAQ, which they should read anyway.
> 
> Well, yes, but as I understood his argument, RPMs are never supposed to go
> in /usr/local.  That really seems to be the bulk of his complaint.

Right, this whole problem is about standards.  The reason we moved to 
/usr/local is because an autoconf-generated configure script installs to 
/usr/local by default.

> On the other hand, What David Mihm says is true (and this is what I told
> Tony): if you move the package _just_ for the RPMs, then dozens of people
> start complaining about how they can't find the files.  Tony's response to
> this is, "Tell 'em to read the READMEs," which hardly helps: one still
> spends hours sending off e-mails with that content.
> 
> Maybe it's better to put in the README.RedHat a note that the RPM is built
> to go in /usr/local, and if they want to move it they ought to rebuild?

Albert suggested a "sed #/usr/local#/usr#".  It's possible to write a 
script to change the docs so that they point to /usr.  Would the spec 
file be able to run this script automatically?  Or, since I gather that 
the rpm building process involves running configure, could we determine 
if configure is being run by rpm?

This has the advantage of following both standards, and providing docs 
that point to the right place.  We would still have the problem of needing 
to know if AS was installed via rpm, when providing support.  And any docs 
not distributed with AS would point to the wrong place for somebody.

> (Tony also pointed out that, for many RH users. /usr/local is not in the
> path.  So they can't find the file anyway.)

Yup, this can be circumvented by putting the full path for afterstep 
in the xinitrc (or whatever calls AS), but we give up rpm standard 
compliance.

----
Ethan Fischer
allanon@crystaltokyo.com
http://members.xoom.com/allanon1