🚀 go-pugleaf

>>>>> On 16 Mar 92 12:01:01 GMT, mhiroshi@tansei.cc.u-tokyo.ac.jp (mhiroshi) said:


mhiroshi> My opinion about how the GNU software's installation path
mhiroshi> should be set.

    [...]

mhiroshi> 1) The base path should be "/usr/gnu" like "/usr/ucb"
mhiroshi>    rather than "/usr/local" since GNU's software is not

I sympathize, but this wouldn't solve MY problem.

I own a couple of Sun-Sparcs in a large local heterogeneous net with
alot of diskless and "dataless" (i.e. no /usr partition) workstations.
These workstations must mount their /usr partitions over the net and
are NOT allowed to write on them, even to create a "/usr/gnu" mountpoint
without the cooperation of the System Gods.

I wish to use Gnu products, I'm willing to do the work of installing
them, and I want the installed binaries to be easily available to all
Sparc owners on our local net.  I also want to encourage a sun3 user
or two do do something similar for the sun3s on the net.

To do this I need to install things in on a disk that is exported
for NFS mounting throughout our LAN and the hardwired pathnames
in the installed packages should be such that user's don't need
to NFS mount these exported files under any "privileged" name
hierarchy (like /usr) and names must be chosen to avoid architecture
clashes.

My solution has been to install things under "/mb/gnu" with binaries,
libs, include files, etc under /mb/gnu/sun4/{bin,lib,...} and
architecture independent files under
/mb/gnu/{emacs/lisp,emacs/info,man} etc.  "/mb" is chosen because it
happens to be a widely exported and mounted partition around here, and
there is no "/mb" in any of standard Un*x schemes.  This has required
careful (but not terribly painful) reading and editing of Makefiles
and such, and sometimes I've had to do the "make install" stuff by
hand.

mhiroshi> 3) The other idea is that all the programs are made so that
mhiroshi> it refers the user's environment variable as the base directory
mhiroshi> of the GNU products. For example if the environment variable
mhiroshi> GNUPATH is set to /usr/gnu, then everything is relative to that
mhiroshi> path. If the GNUPATH is set to /usr/local, then ... so on.
mhiroshi> However I think floating path is not as good as it sounds.

This sounds better to me.  I want have as much independence in installation
decisions as possible, as easily as possible.  I think the new gnu
configure scheme is moving in this direction.

I'd add to your suggestion as follows.
1)  In addition to flexibility through evironment vars for users,
    there should be flexibility through Makefile vars for installers.
    (This already exists to some extent.)
2)  A distinction should be made between OS and architecture dependent
    parts of the intallation (bin, lib, include, etc.) and independent
    parts (elisp libraries, documentation, troff macro files, etc.)