On Tuesday 16 July 2002 11.33, James.Rocks@equant.com wrote:
Hi,
OK, thanks to help here (Fregus & David) I have now installed ScribuS successfully but, and this is a problem I get with other programs, where does it put the links, the files and what have you ... does a program neccessarily create a menu link? or a desktop link?
Very few programs do. The programs distributed from kde.org seem to put things in the K-menu, and SuSE's rpms also put menu entries, but apart from that the only program I know that creates menu entries or desktop icons is Star/Open Office.
Is where the program installs completely at the direction of the developer?
No, normally you can decide at compile time by passing --prefix= to the configure script. The default is /usr/local since that's where the standards dictate self-compiled programs should go.
Are there any standards that dictate or suggest where this should be or any easy way to find out?
Yes and yes :) The standard is called the File system Hierarchy Standard (FHS) and is a part of the Linux Standards Base (LSB). You can find the FHS at http://www.pathname.com/fhs/ As I said most programs install by default to /usr/local so you'd have the executable in /usr/local/bin. If you want to be certain you could always look in the Makefile for the "install" target, or do "make install > logfile" when you make install. then look in the logfile for a "bin" directory. As a rule of thumb, if it's not in /usr/local there'll be a README that tells you where it is. The default is so common that a developer would have to be very silly not to include a pointer to the location if he doesn't use the default.
This is true (or appears to be true) of RPM's as well as source.
RPMs are slightly different. RPMs that are created by the distribution can be just about anywhere. RPMs that are created by others *should* go into /usr/local but most don't, probably because they don't know about the FHS. However, with rpms you can always do rpm -ql rpmname and get a list of all files included in the rpm, and where they are in the filesystem.
Thanks for any advice :-)
Hope it helps //Anders