On 10/04/2013 10:19 PM, scottmc wrote:
On Fri, Oct 4, 2013 at 12:00 PM, Oliver Tappe <zooey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:zooey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>> wrote: On 2013-10-04 at 19:34:43 [+0200], John Scipione <jscipione@xxxxxxxxx <mailto:jscipione@xxxxxxxxx>> wrote: > I'm a bit late to this discussion, but, won't this break binaries that > specify /boot/common instead of using the B_COMMON_DIRECTORY and > friends paths or how does that work? Yes, software that uses a fixed path pointing to /boot/common will no longer work. Then again, that software is conceptually broken anyway, as the precise reason for having find_directory() is to avoid problems when directories move around. Keep in mind that /boot/common was added to Haiku it wasn't in BeOS, so there's a very good change that any software that gets broken by this is still fresh enough that it can just be fixed/recompiled. IIRC there's been no promise to be binary compatible with previous versions of Haiku pre-R1.
... though we generally try not to break anything, if not necessary. In this case, there's no silver bullet. Hard-coded /boot/common paths are broken by design and there's nothing that can be done.
The B_COMMON_*DIRECTORY constants for the writable directories have been redirected to the respective directories in /boot/system. So, code using those will be fine.
For the constants referring to non-writable directories there's a dilemma. Redirecting them to the respective /boot/system paths will cause code that iterates over certain directories in all installation locations (e.g. all "fonts" directories) to encounter the same directory twice. This may be a problem, depending on what the code expects and how it handles duplicates.
Instead I chose to make the constants resolve to an empty or non-existent directory. This avoids the duplication issue, but code that expects something specifically in some B_COMMON_*DIRECTORY directory will no longer find it. Due to the multiple possible installation locations for packages, this is something that wouldn't work reliably anyway, though.
I removed the B_COMMON_*DIRECTORY constants from the public API, so any code using them will now fail to compile and thus force a review of the code. This is a good thing, since support for the non-packaged directories needs to be added as well.
CU, Ingo
