Re: libgnustep-base split proposal

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 22 Feb 2006, at 17:42, Jeremy Cowgar wrote:

> On Feb 22, 2006, at 2:22 AM, Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:
> > Jeremy Cowgar said that he had problems because the base library  
> > creates/uses a user defaults database, and he didn't want it doing  
> > that... so I spent a little while making that behavior  
> > optional ... and you can pick up the new version from svn.
>
> It was also due to libraries being in odd places and Apache not  
> knowing where to find them. It would have been much easier if there  
> was a /usr/lib/libgnustep-base.so or something like that.

I boggled when I read that ... then realised that my initial  
incomprehension was due to 20+ years experience programming on unix  
style systems ... it simply didn't occur to me that copying the  
library from one directory to another would be an issue for a  
developer (for a user, yes).  GNUstep is by no means alone in putting  
its libraries in its own directories ... many packages (ssh, postgres  
etc) use their own subdirectories.

I really don't know how to address that as a problem.  Of course we  
could provide a script to copy the library ... but then people would  
need to know about the script.    And documentation is presumably not  
the issue, since there is already documentation telling you how to  
set up the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable or /etc/ld.so.conf

Maybe all we really need here is FHS support in the make package so  
you can opt to install in FHS locations? And lots of publicity so  
people know about it.