Re: Feature request: setting env vars for binary wrappers

[Behdad Esfahbod]

On Thu, 2008-04-17 at 16:40 -0500, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> 
> An unfortunate thing is that not all software is configured the same. 
> For example, my own software supports independent configuration for 
> the location of different types of files.  A single top "prefix" 
> environment variable would not directly work with my application
> while 
> it might work for others.  A single top prefix would require that the 
> application know the structure of the build tree, which is likely a 
> bad thing since it may not match the install tree.

It doesn't matter whether your app works with one prefix or not.  That's
not being proposed here.  What is proposed is adding feature that lets
application developer pass any env-var or cmd-line arguments that they
need to the uninstalled binary.  You get to decide what to set.

> It seems to me that the proper place to fix this is at the Automake 
> level since Automake's weak support for tests is the true cause of the
> problem.

As I said, my use case is not running tests at all.  For tests I use
automake's TESTS_ENVIRONMENT variable and it works great.  For example I
have:

TESTS_ENVIRONMENT = CAIRO_XFAIL_TESTS="$(XFAIL_TESTS:$(EXEEXT)=)" 
CAIRO_TEST_TARGET="$(TARGETS)" CAIRO_TEST_TARGET_EXCLUDE="$(TARGETS_EXCLUDE)"

My use case is when users (or myself) want to run the
pango/pango-view/pango-view binary, by hand.  I can put a pango-view.sh
by its side, but users won't run it.

We went through this all two years ago :).


-- 
behdad
http://behdad.org/

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