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Re: Relocatable packages



On Wed, Jan 30, 2002 at 08:48:30PM +0100, Otto Wyss wrote:
> > > but you can't do: dpkg -i --relocate /usr/doc=/usr/share/doc
> > 
> > This is just a small matter of programming.  Even if it were implemented,
> > though, it would not give you any real flexibility unless installed programs
> > were able to dynamically adapt to being relocated.  So I don't think that it
> > would be worthwhile to implement at this time.
> > 
> Is this really true? I thought any program is usually relocatable
> written. I myself have never written any location dependend.
[snip]

Most programs are relocatable, but only as far as compiling default paths
into the binary (e.g. path prefixes: /usr vs. /usr/local vs. /opt, and so
on). Plus, some programs are compiled against environments in known
locations (e.g. X11 libraries in /usr/X11R6/lib, or X11 binaries which are
needed, etc.). You can't easily relocate this without rebuilding the
program.

I don't think we want dpkg to re-build the package upon installation just
so it can be relocated :-) 

Of course, it can be argued that such paths shouldn't be hard-compiled
into the program -- and I'd tend to agree with that -- unfortunately, this
convention is too widespread and likely isn't going to change anytime
soon.


T

-- 
"I'm running Windows '98." "Yes." "My computer isn't working now." "Yes, you
already said that." -- User-Friendly



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