Re: How to find binaries in libexec dir?

[Danny Milosavljevic]

Hi,

On Sat, 16 Apr 2022 16:21:50 -0700
Vagrant Cascadian <vagrant@reproducible-builds.org> wrote:

> But libxmlb ships the xb-tool binary in libexec, which diffoscope cannot
> find on guix.

> For Debian, diffoscope just basically adds the
> corresponding directory to PATH, and it's basically a single directory,
> but I'm not sure how I'd do that with guix ...
> 
> A workaround would be to adjust the libxmlb package so that xb-tool is
> also in PATH somehow, but maybe this is bad form?

Isn't the whole point of libexec so that executable is not in PATH?

FHS section 4.7 says:

>/usr/libexec includes internal binaries that are not intended to be executed 
>directly by users or shell scripts.

libexec is usually used to store tool executables that are invoked internally
by libraries (glibc, ssh, gpg etc).

I'd like to caution against just adding libexec to PATH, because that would
make the entire separation of libexec out of bin (and thus the reason of
existence of libexec) useless to begin with.

I've looked upstream https://github.com/hughsie/libxmlb and it says, very close
to the beginning (so it's a main feature apparently):

>$ xb-tool compile fedora.xmlb fedora.xml.gz

Well, for that to work, xb-tool should be in bin.

I'd file a bug report with libxmlb to move xb-tool to bin.

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