xfce-4.2.2 graphical installer problem

[Auke Kok]

Olivier Fourdan wrote:
> 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 I can I will try to svn co the installer code as well. Benny asked me 
already a while back if it can be merged in xfce's svn and I think 
that's a good idea to do.

In any case, can you see if the occurences of $DESTDIR are followed by a 
'/' ? If not then I think that would be a good addition and at least 
prevents the installing of files as 'directory' names.

sofar