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From: | Neil Jerram |
Subject: | Re: The load path |
Date: | Fri, 12 Nov 2004 21:31:08 +0000 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031107 Debian/1.5-3 |
Andy Wingo wrote:
I agree: when Guile is built and installed using "configure; make; make install", the default load path should certainly include /usr/local. That's not quite what I was addressing though; I was talking about the case where everything on a machine is there through package management - in this case /usr/local isn't needed because there isn't anything in /usr/local.I disagree. When a user downloads an app, builds it and installs it, they should be able to run it. On all configure scripts that I know of, /usr/local is the default prefix. This is fine for C code: the compiler will pick up headers, libs, and binaries from /usr/local, even if the compiler comes from the distribution. Why should guile be any different? Or to take your argument to its conclusion, why include /usr/share/guile/site in the load path? After all, the distro won't put anything there.
My thinking was, that as soon as you have a user who is prepared to do "configure; ...", you have a user who can edit init.scm to add any load path that isn't already there. (E.g. the case where Guile is installed as a package, so is in /usr, but the user builds and installs an add-on .tar.gz themselves in /usr/local.)
Even for modules implementing functionality of an app, that aren't part of its public interface?
Yes, absolutely!
My instinct is to hide them, because then I know they won't cause me problems in the future if someone uses them somehow.
But surely "using them somehow" is what Free Software is all about? Regards, Neil
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