How to determine modular paths?

[Andy Ritger]

Thanks, Stefan.  Responses below:


On Thu, 16 Nov 2006, Stefan Dirsch wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 16, 2006 at 09:20:28AM -0800, Andy Ritger wrote:
>>
>> (This topic came up previously, but the feedback I have received is that
>> the thread didn't completely reach consensus)
>>
>> What is the proper way for a 3rd party X driver installation tool to
>> know the correct path for installation?
>>
>> In this thread:
>>
>>     http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2005-December/011369.html
>>
>> it was suggested to use `pkg-config --variable=moduledir xorg-server`,
>> which seems reasonable to me.  The NVIDIA installation utility runs
>> these commands:
>>
>>     pkg-config --variable=moduledir xorg-server
>>     pkg-config --variable=libdir xorg-server
>>
>> to find the paths for X driver installation and X library installation
>> (like libXvMC).
>>
>> However, in many modular installations, the pkg-config command does
>> not work because the .pc file is not installed along with the X server,
>> but rather with the devel package which many users do not have installed.
>>
>> Are the above pkg-config commands the correct way for 3rd party
>> installation tools to determine the paths where the related files should
>> be installed?
>>
>> If so, then I'd like to argue that it should not require installing a
>> devel package in order to get the .pc file that defines these variables.
>> Rather, it would be very helpful if distributions adjusted their packaging
>> so that .pc files with these variables came with the xorg-server package,
>> without the need to specifically install a devel package.
>
> SUSE will include xorg-server.pc on openSUSE 10.2 by default without
> the need to install a devel package. Unfortunately we won't install
> pkg-config by default, which makes this rather useless again. :-(

That's good news about the .pc file, but bad news about pkg-config.

I guess there are two things here:

     - what the Right Way going forward should be for determining the
       modular path; I would hope that if X.Org collectively defined the
       way that should be used to find the modular path, that over time
       distributions would add support for that.

     - how to determine the modular path on current distributions;
       hopefully the kludges in 3rd party installers like nvidia-installer
       are a sufficient stop gap until distributions add support for
       whatever the X.Org-approved modular path determination mechanism is.

>> FWIW, the NVIDIA installation utility attempts to guess at the modular
>> path if the pkg-config command does not work, but it's not completely
>> reliable.  Source to the utility is here:
>>
>>     ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/nvidia-installer/nvidia-installer-1.0.tar.gz
>
> nvidia-installer-1.0.7.tar.gz is the latest one, correct?

Oh, I'm sorry.  You are correct.

Thanks,
- Andy


> Best regards,
> Stefan
>
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