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

[Ed Hill]

On Wed, 08 Oct 2008 11:59:09 -0700 Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> 
> There's two possible ways to work around this:
> %{_libexecdir}
>   /usr/libexec/gromacs-2/bin/wheel
> 
> /usr/lib (*not* %{_libdir}):
>   /usr/lib/gromacs-2/bin/wheel
> 
> I don't know that I favor one of these over the other... they both
> have precedent.  You could look at this as end-user applications or as
> environment-modules making these binaries "private" to the
> environment-modules "program".

Yes, absolutely!  I can think of examples where both /usr/lib
and /usr/libexec have been used for "private" executables.  I don't
have a strong preference for either -- I just want one to be chosen as
the "standard Fedora way" to handle the various use cases I described
earlier.


> A third way to look at this would be to have an environment-modules
> directory and place things within that:
>   /usr/libexec/environment-modules/gromacs-2/bin/wheel

I'm against the inclusion of "environment-modules" in the path since
you don't *have* to use environment-modules to take advantage of the
multiple implementations or versions once they are made available.  One
can always add the desired paths by hand or via ~/.bash_profile or
some other way.


> I'm not sure whether environment-modules only handles executables or
> if it also handles libraries, datafiles, etc, though.  So I don't know
> whether that's the best place for an environment-modules directory to
> live.  Ed, do you have a comment on whether this is a good or bad idea
> for use of environment-modules?

The environment-variables system can and does (and is often used at
cluster and/or "supercomputer" sites) to handle all sorts of
environment variables including:

  PATH, MANPATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, CFLAGS, LDFLAGS, etc.

The environment-modules can also depend upon each other (so using one
automatically pulls in all its dependencies).  But that's another
topic...

Ed

-- 
Edward H. Hill III, PhD  |  ed at eh3.com  |  http://eh3.com/
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