On Fri, 2012-02-10 at 14:01 -0800, Brian Gerkey wrote: 
> On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 9:06 AM, Jack O'Quin <jack.oquin@gmail.com> wrote:
> > As an old Unix developer I have a somewhat visceral reaction against
> > putting machine-dependent binaries inside a share directory. I suppose
> > it's too late to fix that for Fuerte, but it's just wrong, and almost
> > anything would be better. This will not be easy to fix in a future
> > release.
> >
> > There is no obvious choice for an alternative. Although "/lib" mostly
> > contains libraries, there are actually quite a few executables in its
> > subdirectories, and many more under "/usr/lib". So, I suggest
> > something like "lib/ros/<ros-package-name>" in place of
> > "share/<ros-package-name>". Another alternative might be "opt" (or
> > just making something up), but "lib" seems better to me.
> >
> > Using "share/ros/<ros-package-name>" for genuine
> > architecture-independent files (.xml, .yaml, etc.) is good, but not a
> > requirement. There are advantages to keeping most or all installed
> > files for a single package together.
> 
> You have a point there.  We could easily go into
> "lib/<ros-package-name>".    We'd just have point ROS_PACKAGE_PATH to
> lib instead of share, and CMake will find things in
> "lib/<ros-package-name>/cmake" the same as it will in
> "share/<ros-package-name>/cmake."
> 
> Now, if we want to go into "lib/ros/<ros-package-name>," then we'd
> have to play with the CMake infrastructure some to make things like
> 'find_package(roscpp)' work properly.  How important do you think it
> is to have the intermediate "ros" directory in there?

Putting binaries in share seems strange to me as well. I would prefer
something like the bsd concept of libexec [1] or
lib/ros/<ros-package-name>. lib/<ros-package-name> seems like it will
cause namespace problems and clutter.

...

[1]
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/dirstructure.html


-- 
Bill Morris <bill@iheartengineering.com>
I Heart Engineering
http://www.iheartengineering.com
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