Supporting third party software in /usr/local

[Per Bjornsson]

On Fri, 2005-10-21 at 21:46 +0100, Mike Hearn wrote:
> On Fri, 21 Oct 2005 11:41:01 -0700, Per Bjornsson wrote:
> > Boy, I should really learn to proofread better! I meant to say that I had
> > put desktop files in /usr/local/share/applications and it _does_ work on
> > my systems, and I have not changed anything in the menu definition files.
> > (Only tested on FC4 though, I don't have anything older around right now.)
> 
> Hmm, that's odd, doesn't work here. Maybe XDG_DATA_DIRS includes it on
> your system and so it doesn't need to be merged into the menu file
> explicitly?

Actually, as far as I can tell XDG_DATA_DIRS is just not set at all in
my environment. (Just checking in a shell, but I suppose the panel
should have the same environment.) In this case, the Freedesktop basedir
spec says that the value /usr/local/share/:/usr/share/ should be used.
( http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/latest/ar01s03.html if
anyone is interested in looking at this.) As far as I can see, if the
variable is simply not set at all, everything should just work, so just
not having the variable set seems like a good default to me. Is this
environment variable getting set on a fresh FC4 installation somewhere?
(If this was the case, wouldn't it be getting set in /etc/profile or
somewhere in /etc/profile.d? I can't find anything about setting that
environment variable there.) Mike, could you check if it is actually set
on your computer (and in that case where it's getting set)?

/Per