On Fri, 17 Jul 1998, UNIX hacker and security officer wrote:

: Well, then we better figure out how to make packagized things more able
: to respond to the -p option.

: Needless to say, I think we're trying to avoid this, but we would do
: well to find some way of making the installations more robust and less
: fragile WRT installation paths.  I mean, hell, Sun can do it, why can't
: _we_?

Sun doesn't do it with third-party software.  Sun does it only with their
own, and then it's not guaranteed to be relocatable.  (Not even SunPC allows
relocation - it's supposedly "their" code, but actually written by Insignia;
it's fixed at /opt/SUNWsunpc.) 

I think trying to work around everyone else's hard-coded paths is so large
an undertaking as to be detrimental to the sanity of anyone attempting it.

"You don't like our installation prefix?  We have pkgsrc.  Build it
yourself."

-- 
-- Todd Vierling (Personal tv@pobox.com; Bus. todd_vierling@xn.xerox.com)