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

[Philip Brown]

On Wed, Feb 9, 2011 at 1:05 AM, Dagobert Michelsen <dam at opencsw.org> wrote:
> Hi Phil,

*wave*


>>> I 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.
>
> Think of "The default location for package installation is /usr/local if
> you don't specify --prefix". Changing this to /opt/csw would be plain
> wrong. There are lots of other cases.

Errr.. those are build instructions. The general case for that type of
"error", is
"anything that relates to people *building* the package".
Yes, its technically "wrong" to change that, but on the other hand, it
will in no way hurt users, since they're not the ones building the
package.

Any other class of error for this, that you can think of?

btw, I'm all for a more intelligent auto-changer, that does the
changes, but also reports back to the maintainer, "this is what I
changed".
For the gar afficionados, this should be easy, if you leverage the git
stuff before and after.

>> 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"?
>
> Because there is a bug report.

You are making the very VERY wrong assumption, that bug reports,
magically, accurately, and always appear for problems.
Unfortunately, the opposite is more often true.
Just a month ago, I discovered a bug, of this very nature(unfixed
/usr/local reference), in a package, because of the autochecker. It
had been there for YEARS. No one had noticed it, or at least no one
reported it. So the package was missing proper functionality.
Not critial "it doesnt work!" functionality, but still missing.