[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#815174: staden: Missing links in /usr/bin

[Andreas Tille]

Hi Kerstin,

On Sat, Feb 20, 2016 at 01:37:35PM +0100, Kerstin Hoef-Emden wrote:
> > 
> > thanks a lot for this bug report which is really appreciated as well as
> > the analysis of the error and the hint for a fix.  I've not decided
> > whether we really should provide eba itself in /usr/bin or whether it
> > might be better to use wrapper scripts setting the PATH to
> > /usr/lib/staden/bin.  The question is whether eba is a user oriented
> > application itself or just an internal helper.
> 
> It seems to me that the staden works modularly. The package contains
> four GUIs (pregap, gap4, gap5 and spin), which use the other programs to
> perform actions. Apparently these modules have to be in the same
> directory as the GUIs. Creating links to /usr/lib/staden/bin for all
> staden executables seems to me the "cleaner" solution.

>From a Debian point of view clean means that we link only those
executables to /usr/bin which are directly called by the user.  Otherwise
we would clutter the name space with lots of quite generic names which
is not a good idea.  So if all these binaries should be in the same dir
it would better be to use a wrapper script /usr/bin/gap4 like

#!/bin/sh
STADENDIR=/usr/lib/staden/bin
exename=`basename $0`
PATH=$STADENDIR:$PATH
$STADENDIR/${exename} $@

and use symlinks in /usr/bin for the other GUI programs to
/usr/bin/gap4.  This has the same effect that all modules reside in the
same dir (/usr/lib/staden/bin) but only the GUI programs are exposed to
the user.

For sure I'd like to hear upstream opinion whether there might be any
need for users to call any of those other tools directly.

> After all it
> seems to work (concerning this topic). (BTW, not surprisingly the same
> problem show up with my 64-bit machine at home).

Yes, there is no reason to assume that the issue depends from the
architecture of the machine.
 
> Best wishes,

Thanks again for the clarification

      Andreas.

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