Finding libexec files / relocation

[David Faure]

On Friday 28 March 2014 02:23:46 Aleix Pol wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 24, 2014 at 5:29 PM, Alex Merry <alex.merry at kde.org> wrote:
> > Currently, paths to libexec files are hardcoded (or not... see
> > https://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/117023/).  This works find unless you
> > want to relocate anything.
> > 
> > I know that relocating is something that has come up with KDE on Windows
> > stuff.  Is it something we want to support?  If so, how would we do it?
> > 
> > I think most of the rest of our stuff (including CMake code) supports
> > relocation, even if you have to set some environment variables to
> > support it (like LD_LIBRARY_PATH on Linux).

I've been asking the same questions for years (see this list, 21 Feb 2013, 
subject contains libexec), I also brought it up with Qt people, asked if LSB 
had anything, etc. ... There is just no standard mechanism for this.

Some magic was suggested, for a library to detect where it is located at 
runtime (by Oswald and by Alex Neundorf, independently, not even sure if it's 
the same magic), I never looked deeply into it, feel free to do so h:)

> I just saw that Qt itself is already installing things in <prefix>/libexec
> (e.g. libexec/QtWebProcess). We probably want to do the same.

Qt is well known for NOT being relocatable (especially qmake), so I'm not sure 
how much this example helps at all.

-- 
David Faure, faure at kde.org, http://www.davidfaure.fr
Working on KDE, in particular KDE Frameworks 5