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

Colin Law clanlaw at gmail.com
Thu May 2 12:40:32 EDT 2019


On many varieties of Linux /usr/local is the conventional location to
add locally built packages.  In this case probably /usr/local/gnucash.
I think the build instructions used to suggest that but I may be
mistaken.

Colin

On Thu, 2 May 2019 at 17:27, Geert Janssens <geert.gnucash at kobaltwit.be> wrote:
>
> Op donderdag 2 mei 2019 18:03:22 CEST schreef Tommy Trussell:
> > On Thu, May 2, 2019 at 6:02 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.
> >
> > ...
> >
> > > So personally I would recommend against using $HOME/.local as installation
> > > prefix. I am however curious where this suggestion originally came from.
> >
> > This is entirely speculation... I'm looking at this system where I've been
> > testing the GnuCash versions available as Snap and Flatpak... and I see
> > that the Flatpak installation apparently added
> > ~/.local/share/flatpak/exports/share to the $XDG_DATA_DIRS environment
> > variable.
> >
> > Maybe whoever wrote the wiki entry was also working with Flatpak and
> > thought .local would be a good place to stash things to make them more
> > accessible to Flatpak.
> >
> Possibly.
>
> > I would think ~/bin would be a more ideal suggestion because I see it is
> > already defined in my bash $PATH on this Ubuntu machine. (And I'm pretty
> > sure I didn't add it, though I may have.)
>
> That would be another alternative location. To have gnucash benefit from ~/bin
> being on the path though the gnucash binary itself should be ~/bin/gnucash.
>
> Translating this back to the required installation prefix would mean the
> installation prefix should be $HOME.
>
> This is certainly possible but has the drawback the installation would add
> extra directories in your home directory, like
> ~/share
> ~/etc
> ~/lib(64)
> ...
>
> That may be cluttering the home directory more than the average user may like.
> And in addition if someone is adding other binaries to ~/bin it again becomes
> more difficult to keep the gnucash build separate from everything else.
>
> To me something like Adrien suggested makes most sense.
> One could add two extra steps to simplify launching gnucash afterwards:
> - make a softlink from <installation_prefix>/bin/gnucash to /home/bin/gnucash.
> This would allow console users to simply type "gnucash" to run their own
> gnucash build.
> - copy <installation/prefix>/share/applications/gnucash.desktop to
> ~/.local/share/applications
> That should make you graphical environment aware of your self-built gnucash
> and have it pop up in the usual places to launch applications (the Kicker menu
> on KDE, or the gnome-shell application launcher).
>
> Regards,
>
> Geert
>
>
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