Re: finding datadir from executable

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Sat, 11 Sep 2004, Bruce Korb wrote:

> Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> > On Sat, 11 Sep 2004, Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:
> > > > That, unfortunately, is too convoluted to figure out without real study.
> > > > Without a clear example, I simply find the full, real path of the executable
> > > > and presume that the standard ../share/${program}/ is correct.  Probably
> > > > an illuminating example would make life easier.....  :-)
> > >
> > > If a GPL'd solution is OK, I recommend libiberty.  I moved GCC's
> > > make_relative_prefix into libiberty some time ago because I kept
> > > needing this functionality elsewhere.
> > >
> > > You give it argv[0], BINDIR, and OTHERDIR; it computes the relative
> > > path between bindir and otherdir, finds your application in $PATH or
> > > similar, and works out the likely location of otherdir.
> >
> > Similar code is currently embedded in libtool in order to support
> > wrappers for executables under Cygwin.  The code should be portable.
>
> All of these are buried to various degrees.  To be useful, it needs
> to be a clear example -- maybe even a web page.  I haven't looked at
> the libiberty code yet, but the gettext example was too obtuse for
> me to want to spend the energy to reverse engineer it; and the libtool
> example is also not readily apparent.  I suspect that the libiberty
> variation is a run time computation, though BINDIR and DATADIR are
> constructed at build time.  An autoconf macro that produced
> BINDIR_TO_xxxxDIR at build time would be nice, simple and appreciated.

It seems to me that this issue is a small matter of application 
programming which is outside the scope of autoconf.

Even my own package (GraphicsMagick) includes code to find its 
installed data files based on the location of the executable.

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden
http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen