[Bf-committers] Blender installation, misc comments ( was: Re: Meeting notes sun may 18)

[Christian Plessl]

Hi All

I have noticed, that the automake/autoconf build framework neither installes
the fonts/locales to the .blender directory, nor does it install file for
the plugin support. As far as I understand, this is because the
autoconf/make framework does not yet provide a Makefile corresponding to
the NaN Makefile in the release directory. 

Is anybody working on this so far?

The Meeting notes from the last IRC meeting discuss the future installation
procedure for blender, see quote below:

> Installation procedure
> - all blender help files will move to @HOME/.blender in the next
> release.
> - double-clicking a .blend file in windows and osx gives an error
> (.Blanguages not found). Has to be solved... the platform managers look
> at this.
> - for windows, the usage of Registries will be evaluated. apheX
> coordinates.

Does this mean, that in future all blender support files, e.g. fonts, help
files, translations need to be installed in $HOME/.blender? Im not sure,
whether this is a good idea, at least for the Linux plattform.

I do understand the reasoning behind this, a user should be able to install
blender withouth having root access to the machine. I agree, that this is
desirable, but relying on files in $HOME/.blender only seems not the best
solution to me.

I would suggest to install system-wide defaults in /usr/share/blender but
allow to override these systemwide configurations local configurations in a
$HOME/.blender directory. This is what most applications (at least on the
Linux plattform) do.

Regards,
 Christian