[Bf-committers] Setting a default system scripts directory

[michael at obberon.com]

(I'm sorry if you receive this email multiple times, I seem to be having
trouble posting to the mailing-list)

Hi everyone,

I am currently working on packaging blender for the Linux distribution
that I use, and have run into a problem concerning the scripts directory.
I was
advised to make a post here so I could maybe get this resolved.

As it is now, blender checks the following directories for scripts on my
system (from strace):
        - /home/michael/.blender
        - /usr/bin/.blender
        - /usr/bin/release/scripts

I think it would be very helpful for distributions to be able to specify a
system scripts directory either through the existing build systems, or
with an environment variable that distributions can put in the global
profile or that users can set at runtime. Currently, distributions have to
work around the problem by either patching the source to hard-code the
path in, or just
installing to an arbitrary location and making the user set that as his/her
default.

To solve this problem in the build system would involve some setting (which
can default to /usr/share/blender or whatever the sane default is for the
platform) like BLENDER_SCRIPTS_DIR for SCons, or -DBLENDER_SCRIPTS_DIR
=/path/to/scripts for cmake.

An environment variable would also work (even in addition to compiling in a
default). Something like BLENDER_SCRIPTS_DIR would be appropriate I think.
This would probably be simpler to implement, although maybe not the
cleanest solution.

I'd love to hear your feedback on this issue, and if no one objects to the
idea, but developer resources are limited, I could probably put together a
patch.

Thanks!
-- 
Michael Forney <michael at obberon.com>