KDE4 Patch to allow testing/execution of uninstalled kparts/XMLGUI applications

[David Faure]

On Tuesday 09 August 2005 12:36, Friedrich W. H. Kossebau wrote:
> Am Dienstag, 9. August 2005 03:58, schrieb David Faure:
> > On Tuesday 09 August 2005 03:30, Adam Treat wrote:
> > > I understood it to mean a new command line argument that would specify
> > > the .krcdirs filename.  This way, if the flag isn't present, everything
> > > takes place as normal.  I can't really see where this is a big security
> > > improvement, but I could take this approach instead, rather than use the
> > > current working directory...
> > >
> > > It wouldn't mean anything other than the app would have to be executed
> > > with the a '--resources' command line parameter in order to run
> > > locally...  Does this sound better to you, David?  Or do you think we
> > > should just go with the CWD?
> >
> > I see so many people run "./kmyapp" and it fails (no menus, no icons etc.),
> > I think we should make it work out of the box. 
> 
> If they are able to put a "./" before the app they are also able to put a 
> parameter behind.

I think I didn't make my point clear, then ;)

Download the source tarball for any non-kde application, compile, then
run the binary without installing it. For most non graphical programs it's as easy
as "./foobar". That's the way to do it - the standard unix way that everybody knows.

If for a kde app it's more complicated than that, then it defeats the purpose IMHO.
Given that we have a solution for making it that easy, we should make it that easy.
Why require people to set env vars, or pass additional command-line options, when
the standard way can be made to work, simply by shipping a file together with
the sources?

> Another idea: Check if the arg0 has "./" before and then 
> take this as the security parameter perhaps?

Might work (except for people who put "." in their $PATH and don't have
another version of the app installed....)

> [...]
> Oh. In which way?

Not sure if that questions was about libtool libraries or about installing
modified version of libraries to make an executable behave differently?
The latter seems obvious to me (if it's about a build directory, which isn't
root-owned), and the former is simply "./myexe will use the local libs 
like .libs/libfoo.so, to make it possible to run the app without installing it".
Oh, and it does that without you having to pass special command-line arguments ;)

-- 
David Faure, faure at kde.org, sponsored by Trolltech to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).