Supporting third party software in /usr/local

[Michael A. Peters]

On Thu, 2005-10-20 at 16:32 +0100, Mike Hearn wrote:

> 
> Here are a few I noticed a while back - apologies if these have changed in
> rawhide or if I am misremembering:
> 
>  * /etc/ld.so.conf doesn't include /usr/local/lib

IMHO that is a bug and should be fixed.
However - you can add a directory via placing a file
in /etc/ld.so.conf.d/

>  * /etc/xdg/menus/applications.menu doesn't merge
>    /usr/local/share/applications   [bug #117671]

I believe the standard is that they go into /usr/share/applications.
To avoid conflict - desktop-file-install should be used specifying the
vendor.

For example - in Fedora Extras we use --vendor=fedora which results in
the desktop files having a prefix of fedora-

If desktop files conflict between two vendors, it is imho a packaging
bug by one (or both) vendors. Using desktop-file-install also ensures
that desktop file isn't completely broken.

>  * $XDG_DATA_DIRS doesn't include /usr/local/share

That imho is a bug

>  * $BONOBO_ACTIVATION_PATH doesn't include /usr/local/lib/bonobo/servers

I can't speak to that.

>  * $KDEDIRS doesn't include /usr/local

I can't speak to that.

>  * $PKG_CONFIG_PATH doesn't include /usr/lib/pkgconfig

I assume you mean /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig

It probably should be up to the script of a devel package to add that if
it needs that but it isn't set already. You could install a script
in /etc/profile.d/ if the PKG_CONFIG path doesn't include the path to
your pkgconfig files.

>  * DBUS configuration file does not <includedir> /usr/local/etc/dbus-1/system.d

I can't speak to that.

>  * fontconfig doesn't have a <dir> element for /usr/local/share/fonts

That I consider to be a bug, since the file where it is set has a big
warning about not editing it.

But perhaps there is a way to add to the searched patch
via /etc/fonts/local.conf or in new fontconfig, /etc/fonts/conf.d ?

<offtopic>
Speaking of not editing that file, it also includes the fake italic and
fake bold instructions, which I think in the fontconfig 2.4 branch
should be files in /etc/fonts/conf.d/ so they can be disabled w/o
editing the "do not edit" config file
</offtopic>

>  * Actually I'm not even sure regular $PATH includes /usr/local/bin, but
>    maybe that was some other distro ...

/usr/local/bin is in my path - if a distro does not include it, it is
imho a bug.