On Sat, 6 Jul 2002, Guy Harris uttered the following:
> On Sat, Jul 06, 2002 at 11:35:17AM +0100, Nix wrote:
>> - prematurely expanding `PLUGIN_DIR' so that it doesn't move around
>> if the user resets `prefix' at installation time --- obviously you
>> need to expand it because it gets substituted into C code, so
>> I've introduced a `plugindir' make variable which contains the
>> unexpanded value.
>
> If it's substituted into the C code, what happens if you reset "prefix"
> at installation time? Does the resulting Ethereal - which is presumably
> looking for plugins in the directory specified at compile time - find
> the plugins?
Yes, but that's not a bug.
The point of changing prefix at installation time is to install in a
different directory from that in which the package will look for its
pieces. You might configure with prefix set to /usr/local, then
install with
make install prefix=/usr/local/stow/ethereal-0.9.5
and use stow (or one of the half-a-dozen similar tools) to make symlinks
from /usr/local/stow/ethereal-0.9.5/bin/ethereal to
/usr/local/bin/ethereal (and so on for everything else under
/usr/local/stow/ethereal-0.9.5). (Sites using AFS do this a lot, too.)
So when the binary looks for its pieces in
/usr/local/lib/ethereal/plugins/0.9.5, it'll find them, even though
they'll be symlinks (or one of those directories will be a symlink).
It might sound baroque, but it works: it makes for a nice simple package
manager for /usr/local with no databases to get corrupted :)
(hell, not necessarily just /usr/local: the machine I'm writing this on
is *entirely* managed that way, with 1830 symlinks in /usr/bin, and no
files at all...)
--
`What happened?'
`Nick shipped buggy code!'
`Oh, no dinner for him...'
