Re: GNUstep.sh / env sanity patches

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 18 Aug 2004, at 02:50, John Davidorff Pell wrote:

> If GNUstep-installation-one is installed in /usr/local/GNUstep1 and 
> GNUstep-installation-two is installed in /usr/local/GNUstep2, then we 
> need some way of telling one that its in one directory, and the other 
> in the other, hence the need for a specifiable GNUsteprc, right? 
> Actually, i would expect that installation one should have hard coded 
> into it where it lives, since it cannot be easily relocated anyway. 
> This should solve some of the requirements for a GNUsteprc.

I'm very strongly against having a fixed location which cannot be 
overridden hardcoded into GNUstep.  I want to be able to produce a 
binary software distribution that I can give to a customer on a cd-rom 
and tell them to install it and run it wherever they like on their 
machine.

> I think that all such requirements can be fixed this way. If I want to 
> run myTool with GNUstep2 instead of GNUstep1, then I should run 
> /usr/local/GNUstep2/{System,Local,Network}/Tools/myTool anyway, right?

Then you have had to compile two separate versions ... twice as much 
work.  What you should be able to do is take a single binary 
distribution and simply unpack into the location you want it.  Then 
users of each installation just need to have an environment variable 
set to say which installation they are using.

This is not important for most people, but it *is* important if you 
need to roll out binary distributions to customers.  If you make a 
software release which has dependencies on features of a recent 
GNUstep, you need to distribute the GNUstep system as part of the 
release.  You can't ask your customers to grab the latest GNUstep from 
CVS, and build it with their own local configuration options before 
they can install/use the new release.