# from Adam Kennedy
# on Friday 23 January 2009 06:35:
>> That sounds reasonable, but what about an application which simply
>> wants to decide on some install path (managing runtime reads itself
>> - without the help of File::ShareDir)? I think this might get into
>> the whole business of PREFIX, which is that unix folks expect that
>> they can install in $PREFIX/share/myapp or something, but IIRC not
>> even OS X fully supports this notion of a PREFIX.
>
>PREFIX is non-viable, which is why Module::Build went away from it and
>only emulated it (right?) under massive pressure from people to not
>break something that USED to work under EU:MM.
Right. I think the unix users have also gotten used to administration
of things which use PREFIX. So, for situations where an admin would
expect an application to install stuff in $PREFIX/share/application --
what is our solution? I think anything which relies on the vendor
setup of Config.pm might be problematic for users (who don't want to
hear about how their vendor should such-and-such?)
The unix user's point of view here might be something like: "Sure you're
a cross-platform application. My platform uses $PREFIX/share for that
stuff."
And so we have an issue because PREFIX has been exploded into parts and
spread around the system. Could we pick a part to follow for a given
platform or perhaps go platform-specific in some cases?
In the zim case, they were just using the bin dir from the install sets
to derive a location for share. Perhaps there's a reasonable
assumption which can be made somewhere along these lines?
--Eric
--
To a database person, every nail looks like a thumb.
--Jamie Zawinski
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