Re: Another thought about GNUSTEP_INSTALLATION_DOMAIN

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 13 Oct 2006, at 09:32, Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:

> It occurs to me that NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains() has a  
> mask of domains as the second argument.
> That means that code looking for resources is expected to know  
> which domain it should be finding them in ... rather than just  
> looking in all domains.
> So there is an inbuilt assumption supported by the API that certain  
> packages are installed in certain domains.
>
> We could go through all code and make sure that whenever  
> NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains() is used, its second argument  
> is the mask of all domains ... so that it should work wherever  
> packages are installed.
> The downsides of that are ...
> 1. we don't control all the code using that function
> 2. it may not be a good idea to load some resources from some  
> domains (eg security)
>
> However, we could just say
> 1. it's the programmers fault if they depend on a resource in a  
> particular location, and well written code should cope
> 2. security issues should be addressed independently anyway
>
> But if we do that I think we need to document it very clearly.

Searching through the base library I see that it currently expects to  
find the SSL bundle, the gdomap nameserver executable, the gdnc  
notifcation server executable and system documentation projects in  
the System domain.

So, as it currently stands, gnustep-base would *mostly* work if  
installed in a non-System domain, but not entirely.

I guess there are other similar dependencies and cases of reduced  
functionality in many other bits of software.