Change in qt/qtbase[dev]: QStandardPaths: Add XDG_CONFIG_DIRS and XDG_DATA_DIRS paths ...

[René J.V. Bertin]

On Wednesday January 14 2015 14:44:12 Jeremy Whiting wrote:
> Jeremy Whiting has posted comments on this change.

Jeremy, could you summarise the changes please?

> 
> Change subject: QStandardPaths: Add XDG_CONFIG_DIRS and XDG_DATA_DIRS paths on OSX.
> ......................................................................
> 
> 
> Patch Set 3:
> > What is the intended way of deploying and running a KDE application on Mac
> > OS X?
> > 
> > One way that I can see is to create real bundles. So if Kate uses
> > kf5-karchive, it would include this and other frameworks it needs in its
> > own bundle. The application would be entirely self-contained and there
> > would be no relevance for any XDG environment variables AFAICS. I
> > personally think this is a good way of deploying applications, because it
> > is very user friendly.
> > 
> > Another way that I can see is through frameworks like (home)brew, where
> > each
> > application will end up in its own prefix, right? (something like
> > /usr/local/Cellar/Kate/5.0/...) How would frameworks cooperate with
> > cellars
> > and how would any environment variables - that are required for running -
> > be set? Is this something the user would have to do in the terminal?> > 
> Simon,
> 
> Exactly, there are two ways, one including all libraries and data files within the .app itself, and two, using homebrew/fink/macports to install the application and it's dependencies. From what I've seen with macports you set your prefix and it adds environment variables to your user's startup script (.profile iirc) so the prefix you set is initialized by the homebrew/fink/macports setup itself.

It's been a while since I installed MacPorts from scratch, and I don't think it ever actually modified my startup script, but in principle you only need to add /opt/local/bin (or ${prefix}/bin) to your path. And even that is more or less optional. You select the prefix through the MacPorts installer. I think most people take the default (for which binary packages exist), and then move the tree and put a symlink at /opt/local if they want to use another location.

HomeBrew has a somewhat unique approach using 'Cellars', but MacPorts and Fink are comparable to Gentoo Prefix. Both avoid /usr/local which would be the standard choice on Linux; Fink installs everything under /sw and MacPorts supports a user-selectable prefix that defaults to /opt/local . Inside, they behave like many Linux distributions do, more or less rearranging things, and MacPorts even aims to provide almost all dependencies itself.