[GNC-dev] About the "$HOME/.local" installation prefix

[Adrien Monteleone]

Good question.

I’ve never used that location, and have not otherwise seen any recommendation to use it for a single/local-user installation.

I’ve seen people recommend to recreate the official tree under ~/ (~/usr, ~/usr/local, ~/usr/bin) which doesn’t make much sense to me, or something else like:

~/apps, ~/applications

I would think a recommendation of:

$HOME/apps/gnucash, $HOME/applications/gnucash

would be fine as it would be easier to remove. (one could maybe keep a `$HOME/apps/gnucash/build` directory around for that eventual removal)

Regards,
Adrien

> On May 2, 2019, at 6:01 AM, Geert Janssens <geert.gnucash at kobaltwit.be> wrote:
> 
> Our current wiki on building gnucash for Ubuntu 16.04 (https://
> wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/BuildUbuntu16.04) suggests $HOME/.local as a valid 
> installation prefix.
> 
> While checking for another thread I have found this to be problematic.
> 
> In particular when using this installation prefix, a number of files and 
> directories will be added in $HOME/.local/share/. That directory however is 
> also to primary directory where a running applications store their runtime 
> data. So the same directory is being used as installation directory and data 
> directory.
> 
> That makes it pretty difficult to quickly remove the local gnucash 
> installation in one go as the installation directory may also hold runtime 
> data (and from more than one application!).
> 
> So personally I would recommend against using $HOME/.local as installation 
> prefix. I am however curious where this suggestion originally came from.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Geert