| Tony Houghton 2005-03-31, 6:26 pm |
| I'd like to make Debian packages for ROX-Session and some of the
applications that go with it in the ROX desktop environment. See
<http://rox.sf.net>. NB there's already a package for ROX-Filer in
unstable, which splits up the application into various FHS-compliant
locations rather than follow ROX's app dir concept. The problem I have
is that I can't decide on a suitable location for a system-wide Apps
directory. ROX uses app dirs ie an application is contained entirely
within one directory. ROX-Filer can identify when a directory is an
application by certain special files inside it, and clicking it runs it
(via the AppRun script inside) instead of opening the directory.
So app dirs can go anywhere and still work in ROX-Filer, but usually
each user has a ~/Apps. The app dir is an essential part of a ROX
application, so dpkg/apt has to be able to install that somewhere, and
it doesn't work on a per-user basis, so I need a system-wide version
which each user could link into their desktop.
I was thinking of something like /usr/share/rox-desktop/Apps (I would
probably make a meta-package called rox-desktop anyway, to conveniently
install a nice bundle of applications), but that would mean having to
move the binaries into /usr/bin and modifying the AppRun scripts because
/usr/share is arch-independent. Several ROX developers seem to be rather
against that and it would make packaging a little harder.
A location within /opt would satisfy both the FHS and the ROX community,
but not Debian I think, because I've never known any other package to
use it.
Someone suggested putting it in /usr/lib. I'm not all that keen, because
*/lib has become a bit of a dumping ground, but I understand there is
precedent with GNUstep.
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