[Radiance-dev] Re: Radiance in Debian

[Bernd Zeimetz]

Charles Ehrlich wrote:
> If creating a special Radiance binpath is not acceptable, another solution is to create the following scene fixing utility for distribution with Debian Linux Radiance distributions.  A little messy, but it would work.


Sorry for my late reply, but I'm missing a bit free time for packaging
work these days.

Creating an extra bin path is not a problem, but this makes things
unnecessarily confusing for new Radiance users. If you'd like to see the
Radiance community grow (which is one of the reasons why I've started to
work on a package for Debian - Radiance is too good to hide it somewhere
in a small, closed community), things should be as easy as possible.
This includes binaries in $PATH and their manpages within the manpath.
I've rarely seen a program which comes with such a good documentation in
form of manpages, it would be a shame to hide them, just because we move
all tools into a non-public path.

For those people who add an extra path to their PATH anyway:
What about creating a directory which contains the compatibility
symlinks, so you can add this directory to your PATH?
Like a directory /usr/lib/radiance/compat, with the following synlinks
as contens:

bin/genbox -> /usr/bin/genrbox
bin/rview  -> /usr/bin/rvu
share/man/man1/genbox.1.gz -> /usr/share/man/man1/genrbox.1.gz
share/man/man1/rview.1.gz -> /usr/share/man/man1/rvu.1.gz

This would also allow you to add /usr/lib/radiance/compat/share/man to
the manpath to have the manpages available. And new users are able to
use genrbox/rvu without any extra hassle.


Would this solve the problem?


Also I'd like to know if there're other wishes regarding the Dbeian
package, if so, I'd like to change things now before it needs to be done
in a hurry later, and before more new users get used to the current
structure.


Best regards,

Bernd

-- 
Bernd Zeimetz
<bernd at bzed.de>                         <http://bzed.de/>