Re: [gentoo-dev] any interest in removing /usr/qt and /usr/kde ?

[Malte S. Stretz]

On Monday 20 September 2004 18:44 CET Dan Armak wrote:
> On Monday 20 September 2004 19:36, Malte S. Stretz wrote:
> > That's actually a good point.  Theoretically its possible to share some
> > parts of the system across several machines, which is of course
> > complicated by a /foo/kde/x.y/share directory structure.  So most
> > probably your suggestion is the best till now (and also one of the
> > alternatives which was discussed for KDE 4).  A directory
> > /usr/bin/kde/x.y feels weird on the first glance, but why not?
>
> I don't understand this point. Could you please elaborate? Why is
> /usr/bin/kde better than either /usr/kde or /usr/packages/kde? Do you
> mean that kde should be split between
> /usr/{bin,lib,share,include,...}/kde/<version> dirs?

Yes.  The reason is that this would make KDE follow the rationale behind the 
FHS most:  Stuff in share can generally be shared (eg. NFS-mounted) across 
several machines, while lib continas platform-specific stuff and bin... you 
get the point.  This might happen rarely but it's the intention behind the 
split done in the FHS.

I don't know what you mean with docs which don't belong below lib in your 
other mail, was it a misunderstanding of Carsten's mail?

> Specifying such separate dirs rather than a unified KDEDIR/KDEDIRS looks,
> at first sight, to be a major PITA. Maybe they'll improve support for
> this in kde4, but I don't relish the thought of doing it with 3.x. Unless
> there's a way already to specify such separated dirs via env variables a
> la KDEDIRS that I'm not aware of?

I didn't say that this is already possible without much headache, just that 
it's maybe the best/cleanest solution for some distant future.

But actually, even currently I don't see a problem with that; the configure 
line would become rather long ('./configure --bindir=/usr/bin/kde/3.3 
--datadir=/usr/share/kde/3.3 ...') but at least there it would work.  And 
those dirs are available via eg. 'kde-config --path data' later on.

But I don't know how many stuff inside KDE or how many third-party tools 
depend on a "flat" $KDEDIR available via the environment variable(s) so 
this might indeed be stuff for KDE 4.

OTOH is it not like the current approach with /usr/kde eats your children or 
burns your box.  It's just not nice and FHS compliant and stuff but has 
been there for quite some time now and could stay as it is for another year 
or so until KDE 4 is released.  IMHO.

Btw, all this discussion was about KDE, I wonder how GNOME handles this 
stuff.  Does it also use /usr/gnome/x.y or so something else?

Cheers,
Malte

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