Hello to everyone.
I’m writing an application using the KDE ruby bindings and I’d like to
package
it as a gem. However, for the application to integrate correctly with
KDE, a
file with extension .desktop needs to be installed in one of the
directories
contained in the KDEDIRS environment variable (on my system, for
example, they
are /usr and /usr/local). As far as I could understand reading the
rubygems
documentation at docs.rubygems.org (since that page documents rubygems
0.8,
however, I don’t know how much of it is still valid), rubygems installs
all
the files under RUBYLIBPREFIX/gems/RUBYVERSION/gems/GEMNAME-GEMVERSION
(for
example /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/myapplication-1.0.0). Is this
correct?
If so, isn’t there any trick at all allowing me to force it to install
the
.desktop file somewhere else?
If I can’t install the .desktop file in another directory using
rubygems, then
I can only see two other options. The first is to tell the user to add
the
directory where rubygems installed the application to the KDEDIRS
environment
variable; the second is not to use rubygems and to package my
application
using something else. I don’t like any of these approaches. Setting the
environment variable means more work for the user and needs to be done
every
time a new version is released, since the version number is part of the
name
of the directory installs it. Using another packaging system (my choice
in
this case would be using CMake, which is the build system used by KDE
itself)
would force the user to manually install the gems my application depends
on,
again meaning more work for the user. What do you think?
Thanks in advance
Stefano