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tchtools/fc-vm2hex.c: update header comment for new situation
author Mychaela Falconia <falcon@freecalypso.org>
date Wed, 28 Dec 2022 08:41:57 +0000
parents 0a01e1c4ea54
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It has been brought to the Mother's attention that some people don't like the
way our FC host tools are designed to be installed under /opt/freecalypso as
opposed to some standard location like /usr/local, and that some people have
been patching our Makefiles and code to move our installed binaries (and perhaps
some of the support files as well) to other locations which they like better.

PLEASE DON'T DO IT, especially if you are making a package or a build or setup
or install script to be used by more than just you.  FC host tools are a very
complex package with a lot of interrelations between different tools, many
tools in our suite internally invoke other tools by their /opt/freecalypso/bin
absolute pathnames, some tools are designed to be invoked both by human users
and by other tools (rvinterf is a prime example), and there are many support
files used by various tools.  If you try to outsmart the Mother and change the
install location to something other than what I designed it to be, you will
inevitably break something, and you probably won't notice the breakage because
a typical casual user only uses a very small subset of our tools.  Furthermore,
if you move the install location, you will certainly break our various
additional tools which are not included in the core FC host tools package but
are meant to be installed on top of it, as all of them expect and require the
/opt/freecalypso directory hierarchy described in doc/opt-freecalypso-tree.

If your goal is to have our installed binaries accessible with a standard PATH
without adding /opt/freecalypso/bin to it, the correct solution is to list the
binaries installed in /opt/freecalypso/bin and make a symlink to each of these
binaries from /usr/bin or from /usr/local/bin or from wherever you like.  Use
symlinks, don't move the binaries themselves!  If you move the actual binaries,
you will break those tools which internally invoke other tools, which we do a
lot.

If you still dislike the whole idea, consider the way Firefox does it: official
release binaries from Mozilla are meant to be installed under /usr/lib/firefox
or /usr/lib/firefox-$VERSION, the stuff inside that directory looks nothing like
FHS, it is private to Firefox just like our /opt/freecalypso directory hierarchy
is private to FreeCalypso, and the user makes one symlink from /usr/bin/firefox
to /usr/lib/firefox-$VERSION/firefox or wherever the full complex package
resides.  If you can live with Firefox and other major application packages
having their own non-FHS private directory trees, you can surely live with
FreeCalypso doing the same.

Why did we make our prefix /opt/freecalypso and not /usr/lib/freecalypso or
/usr/local/freecalypso?  Because there are many, many places where the full
absolute pathname needs to be typed, and the location we chose is the shortest
among other sensible options.

Anyone who is going to make binary packages of our FC host tools (presumably
for use on systems on which compilation from source is difficult) and wishes to
have their packaging officially endorsed by the upstream MUST follow these
guidelines:

* The complete set of tools and support files MUST be included as if one built
  and installed our package from the official source, without omitting or
  breaking any part which you might consider unimportant.

* Everything MUST be installed under /opt/freecalypso exactly as designed by
  the Mother; symlinks to binaries under /opt/freecalypso/bin from a more user-
  friendly location may optionally be included.