[Debian-med-packaging] Installation of binary tools inside MEME

[Andreas Tille]

Hi,

when continuing a bit with MEME packaging for Debian I stumbled upon an
issue that needs to be discussed with upstream.  Usually Debian installs
every binary a user should execute under /usr/bin.  Thus in the case of
MEME the package in preparation puts 97 executable files into this
directory.  Debian policy checker asks for having a manpage for any file
there and when trying to autocreate these using pod2man and help2man I
finally have drawn the conclusion that we might be on the wrong track
here.

There are some tools that really seem to be MEME *internal* which should
not be called by the user directly.  One example for such an executable
is for instance

  cat_max - Copies standard input to standard output and quits with $status 1
	    if more than <max> bytes are written.

I can not really imagine that this is a user oriented tool but it rather
seems to be something that is used internally by other parts of MEME.

Moreover there are tools with quite generic names.  For instance in the
current packaging attemt a file /usr/bin/tree would be installed which
would create a conflict with the tree package that contains the very
same file name.  So it is not possible to put this executable here in
the meme package.

The usual workaround in this situations is to move all those internal
tools to

    /usr/bin/meme

and set the PATH if needed accordingly.  Only those executables that
should be called by the user should reside in /usr/bin.  Could you
perhaps help to identify what executables this are and whether the plan
to move other tools to some different place might be feasible?

Alternatively we could move *all* executables to /usr/bin/meme and write
some wrapper scripts for the user oriented executables to set the PATH
accordingly or to `cd /usr/bin/meme` and call the real executable there.

Any hint would be welcome.

Kind regards

      Andreas.

-- 
http://fam-tille.de