Re: [REVIEW-3-5] fdo#42961 Don't let env vars interfere with internal bootstrap vars

On Thu, 2012-03-15 at 11:42 +0200, Tor Lillqvist wrote:
> Just out of interest, could you explain a bit more verbosely what is
> going on, what is this ".override" thing? (Or point to some webpage
> documenting it...)

        The bootstrap stuff is (to put it mildly) horribly over-engineered and
not that readable; it does a ton of variable substitution, and it can
read other ini files and substitute variables from them recursively.
Some of those eg. ORIGIN are related to the location of the ini file
itself, and then there are other syntaxes laid on top of that to
interpret each variable:

eg.
UNO_SERVICES=${ORIGIN}/../share/misc/services.rdb ?file:///etc/opt/ure/services.rdb 
?${SYSUSERHOME}/.ure/services.rdb ${URE_MORE_SERVICES}

        One consequence of this is 10 interlinked *rc files (on Linux, or .ini
IIRC on Windows) eg.

TMP_EXTENSIONS=${$BRAND_BASE_DIR/program/bootstraprc:UserInstallation}/user/extensions/tmp

        Which - I assume loads that rc file and hooks the 'UserInstallation'
key out of it.

        In addition to override, there seems to be a .link thing in there as
well.

        IMHO we would benefit from a -much- simpler set of (perhaps two)
LibreOffice + UNO bootstrap files, with fewer features and a simpler
syntax.

        But - of course, that's just me :-)

        It's quite a powerful system anyhow,

        HTH,

                Michael.

-- 
michael.meeks@suse.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot