xfce-4.2.2 graphical installer problem

[Olivier Fourdan]

On Fri, 2005-05-20 at 22:28 +0200, Auke Kok wrote:
> excuse me for butting in but I think you guys are overseeing one thing: 
> most likely it IS the (current!) installer itself that is wrong, and 
> here is why:
> 
> suppose the installer needs to install something in /usr/share/somewhere 
> and assumes that 'somewhere' is such a common directory that the person 
> who wrote it never bothered to 'mkdir -p' it first. the first file that 
> gets installed with 'install file /usr/share/something' (note missing 
> trailing '/') will be copied to the FILE '/usr/share/something'.
> 
> This breaks subsequent attempts to install files into the directory 
> 'usr/share/something' of course.
> 
> I've encountered this hundreds of times in packages with lunar by now. 
> The only proper way to fix is to make sure you (almost always) mkdir -p 
> first, and when using 'install', to make sure you append a '/' behind 
> the target directory. The trailing '/' would cause an error that makes 
> sense to the user: 'Missing directory' or something. THis is easily 
> spotted and fixed too.
> 
> If you still have breaking installations then the only thing you can do 
> is let the user clean it up himself. This approach works best and makes 
> sure you don't break other things even worse.

Well, the installer does nothing but calling "make install" with a
DESTDIR set which is a very standard procedure. 

If that fails for some reason with the xfce4-icon-theme package, I don't
think the problem is with the installer.

That should be fixed in the package itself IMHO.

Cheers,
Olivier.