Re: 3.1.20

[Ulric Eriksson <ulric@siag.nu>]

On Tue, 6 Jul 1999, Davide Barbieri wrote:

>  	I'm the mantainer for Debian of the siag package.
>  I have some complain to do, if I can ... :-).

Welcome as maintainer, and complain on! ;-)

>  Building siag packages for debian with 3.1.20, I have
>  encounter some problems:
> 
>  1) runcmd has no man pages; this is considered a bug
>     in Debian; is it worth creating one, or should
>     I simply link runcmd.1 to undocumented.7?

I wrote a tiny manpage for runcmd today. It'll be in 3.1.21.

>  2) is it possible to have a makefile with different
>     install targets? in Debian we have split siag in
>     a lot of packages, so if someone want to install only
>     egon, he can do so
> 
>     this is achieved, doing a make install, and then
>     separating the install directories in more targets;
>     it would be useful for the Debian packages, but also
>     to everyone else, to have the possibility to install
>     only some part of Siag Office using the upstream
>     Makefile

Hacking the makefiles (or rather, Makefile.am and configure.in) is
certainly possible, and I invite anyone who wants custom targets like that
to contribute patches. Beware, though, that it can be tricky to sort out
which programs depend on what files.

I also have to say that if it were my choice, which it isn't, I wouldn't
split the package. A gzipped tarball of everything "make install-strip"
installs, with dynamically linked executables, fits on a single floppy.
That isn't exactly a heavyweight compared to many other programs these
days. And it may not be obvious to everyone that installing PW without the
spreadsheet leaves you with a word processor incapable of displaying
tables, which to me seems like a high price to pay for saving 0.3 MB of
disk space. Another example is Xfiler, which expects Xedplus to be
available for displaying text files.

>  3) why Siag use /usr/libexec? This is not FHS compliant ...

It is FSF compliant. ;-) Seriously though, you can put the plugins (which
is the only thing Siag uses libexecdir for) anywhere by running configure
like this:

./configure --libexecdir=/usr/lib	# or wherever

They end up in /usr/[local/]libexec by default because it is the default
libexecdir in the makefiles generated by automake/autoconf.

Ulric