[maemo-developers] Considering /opt and MyDocs in your packages

[From: Andrew Flegg]

On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 12:25, Quim Gil<quim.gil at nokia.com> wrote:
>
> The maemo-optify tool helps developers to prepare Debian packages that
> use /opt. This tool moves selected files inside the package to locations
> under /opt, and will symbolically link from the original location to the
> new place of the file. An early version of the tool can be found at
> http://gitorious.org/maemo-af/maemo-optify - see the README file for
> details.

I've a suggestion for Marius, after some discussion on #maemo. This
suggestion should make maemo-optify more compatible with how
Maemo-specific applications, aware of /opt, may use it (and closer to
how /opt is traditionally used in upstream Linux).

Instead of using a fixed prefix of /opt/maemo/<path>, use
/opt/<package>/<trimmed path>.

Examples:

   * Currently /usr/share/bob/foo will get maemo-optified as
     /opt/maemo/usr/share/bob/foo

   * If I was writing `bob' manually, I'd get it to use
     /opt/bob/share/foo

   * With the change I'm proposing above, maemo-optify would produce
     /opt/bob/share/bob/foo

It's not 100%, but will end up being closer to how application
developers would use /opt, and avoid a big messy global /opt/maemo
namespace. Worse still would be people designing things to use
/opt/maemo in lieu of doing it "properly".

Of course, if maemo-optify were really clever, it'd also handle
patterns like the above and produce "/opt/bob/share/foo", but I'd
consider this an optional enhancement.

I'd strongly recommend the main enhancement, however.

Comments, as ever, welcome.

Cheers,

Andrew

-- 
Andrew Flegg -- mailto:andrew at bleb.org  |  http://www.bleb.org/
Maemo Community Council chair