[Fedora-packaging] The role of %{_libexecdir} for using environment-modules

[Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski]

On Wednesday, 08 October 2008 at 15:28, Ed Hill wrote:
> On Wed, 08 Oct 2008 09:57:46 +0300 Jussi Lehtola wrote:
> > On Tue, 2008-10-07 at 21:15 -0400, Ed Hill wrote:
> > > 
> > > *Please* stop suggesting alternatives.
> > > 
> > > Alternatives is a total failure for user-space applications that are
> > > not *completely* generic and 100% interchangeable.  Lets illustrate
> > > this point with three use cases:
> > >
> > > Please notice that modules (aka "environment modules") is a
> > > perfectly workable solution for all the above scenarios and it does
> > > not require any help from an admin (or root/sudo perms).
> > 
> > 
> > Exactly. Now the question still remains where to hide these. OpenMPI
> > puts its wrappers in /usr/share/openmpi, but /usr/share is for
> > architecture independent data.
> > 
> > Since /usr/bin doesn't have any subdirectories to me it seems quite
> > straightforward to use /usr/libexec/%{name} to "hide" the binaries.
> > They are then automatically added to the path upon loading the module.
> > 
> > My interpretation is that this is OK according to the Packaging
> > guidelines: "Libexecdir (aka, /usr/libexec on Fedora systems) should
> > be used as the directory for executable programs that are designed
> > primarily to be run by other programs rather than by users."
> 
> 
> Yes!!!
> 
> And +1 for a convention such as
> 
>   /usr/libexec/%{name}
>   /usr/libexec/%{name}-%{version}
> 
> that allows both names and, if desired, versions.

It still feels like a bit of an abuse of libexec.
I prefer using %{_libdir}/%{name}(-%{version})/bin for this purpose.
Some packages do that (that is, keep their binaries there).

Regards,
R.

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