[csw-maintainers] /usr/{local,share} references

[Philip Brown]

On Tue, Feb 8, 2011 at 1:20 PM, Dagobert Michelsen <dam at opencsw.org> wrote:
> Hi Phil,
>
> Am 08.02.2011 um 21:40 schrieb Philip Brown:
>>
>> A silly little example being
>>
>> for f in `find . -type f | xargs grep -l /usr/local` ; do
>> sed 's:/usr/local:/opt/csw:g' $f >$f.cswfix; mv $f.cswfix $f
>> done
>>
>> Feel free to rewrite in your preferred language of perl, python, or
>> whatever floats your boat :)
>
> You are not serious about this, right?


Well, I would certainly prefer that people manually inspect and replace.
But for those people whining that this takes too much effort, the
above provides an almost effortless alternative.


In inspected a couple of my package
> and every occurence needs to be verified manually. There are even
> scripts looking for configuration stuff which should keep the include
> to /usr/local but must have /opt/csw manually added and the check
> overridden.

I would be interested to hear more details, about specific cases where
the above script did something "bad". I think that all maintainers
would benefit from this information.



> This is even more bad than keeping /usr/local because it says "I have
> looked at it and judged to replace it" instead of "well, I kept the
> defaults, if they are wrong I look again".

But if they dont even look, how are they going to come to the point of
examining the defaults, knowing they are wrong, and "looking again"?

In some cases, having wrong defaults, does not "break" the app. but
you silently lose functionality.
The maintainer may  never notice that unless they explicitly examine
all /usr/local occurrences.
Which is what I'm in favor of, but others are opposed to.




> BTW, I found in yaz a real positive where tons of stuff is correctly
> auto-configured with the exception of one path to /usr/local/share/...
> and a comment /* Don't know how to make this with autoconf */ :-(
> And, yes, this is important to 100% functionality.

That's nice that yaz "does the right thing" for 99%.
Nothing wrong with csw-specific patching for that "one path" that they
dont know how to autoconf either though.