AT&T Unix and the real BSD did have /usr/local as the place for installing stuff not part of the system. Sun Microsystems started using that for their Solaris extensions to BSD and invented /opt as the place for locally-installed packages. Both typically require root to install into and some distros have put stuff in one or the other, so care is advised when using either.
There's another problem: CMake treats both specially and munges the subdirectory locations; this is worst with /opt as it insists on stuffing etc/gnucash into a weird path under /etc so root is required for the install step and gnucash can't find the environment file. I lean towards guiding inexperienced users toward keeping everything in their home directories and away from using su or sudo for anything. Regards, John Ralls > On May 2, 2019, at 9:40 AM, Colin Law <clan...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On many varieties of Linux /usr/local is the conventional location to > add locally built packages. In this case probably /usr/local/gnucash. > I think the build instructions used to suggest that but I may be > mistaken. > > Colin > > On Thu, 2 May 2019 at 17:27, Geert Janssens <geert.gnuc...@kobaltwit.be> > wrote: >> >> Op donderdag 2 mei 2019 18:03:22 CEST schreef Tommy Trussell: >>> On Thu, May 2, 2019 at 6:02 AM Geert Janssens <geert.gnuc...@kobaltwit.be> >>> >>> wrote: >>>> Our current wiki on building gnucash for Ubuntu 16.04 (https:// >>>> wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/BuildUbuntu16.04) suggests $HOME/.local as a valid >>>> installation prefix. >>> >>> ... >>> >>>> So personally I would recommend against using $HOME/.local as installation >>>> prefix. I am however curious where this suggestion originally came from. >>> >>> This is entirely speculation... I'm looking at this system where I've been >>> testing the GnuCash versions available as Snap and Flatpak... and I see >>> that the Flatpak installation apparently added >>> ~/.local/share/flatpak/exports/share to the $XDG_DATA_DIRS environment >>> variable. >>> >>> Maybe whoever wrote the wiki entry was also working with Flatpak and >>> thought .local would be a good place to stash things to make them more >>> accessible to Flatpak. >>> >> Possibly. >> >>> I would think ~/bin would be a more ideal suggestion because I see it is >>> already defined in my bash $PATH on this Ubuntu machine. (And I'm pretty >>> sure I didn't add it, though I may have.) >> >> That would be another alternative location. To have gnucash benefit from >> ~/bin >> being on the path though the gnucash binary itself should be ~/bin/gnucash. >> >> Translating this back to the required installation prefix would mean the >> installation prefix should be $HOME. >> >> This is certainly possible but has the drawback the installation would add >> extra directories in your home directory, like >> ~/share >> ~/etc >> ~/lib(64) >> ... >> >> That may be cluttering the home directory more than the average user may >> like. >> And in addition if someone is adding other binaries to ~/bin it again becomes >> more difficult to keep the gnucash build separate from everything else. >> >> To me something like Adrien suggested makes most sense. >> One could add two extra steps to simplify launching gnucash afterwards: >> - make a softlink from <installation_prefix>/bin/gnucash to >> /home/bin/gnucash. >> This would allow console users to simply type "gnucash" to run their own >> gnucash build. >> - copy <installation/prefix>/share/applications/gnucash.desktop to >> ~/.local/share/applications >> That should make you graphical environment aware of your self-built gnucash >> and have it pop up in the usual places to launch applications (the Kicker >> menu >> on KDE, or the gnome-shell application launcher). >> >> Regards, >> >> Geert >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> gnucash-devel mailing list >> gnucash-devel@gnucash.org >> https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel > _______________________________________________ > gnucash-devel mailing list > gnucash-devel@gnucash.org > https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel _______________________________________________ gnucash-devel mailing list gnucash-devel@gnucash.org https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel