App automatically installs in /usr/lib/ since 0.5.0

[diegomarcov]

Since I upgraded to electron-installer-debian 0.5.0, I noticed that this commit causes my app to install in /usr/lib. This is absolutely not desirable in our case, and I haven't found a way to at least configure this path.

I rolled back the dependency to 0.4.0 momentarily to fix this, but I wouldn't like to be stuck with that forever. Are there plans to make this path configurable (or am I missing this option somewhere)?

Thanks!

[unindented]

@dlech pointed out that Debian guidelines dictate that apps like the ones generated through Electron must live in /usr/lib, not /usr/share. Why is it not desirable in your case?

[diegomarcov]

Hi @unindented , sorry it took a bit to respond. In our case, we got reports from Linux users because their shortcuts stopped working. This is the way we actually found out about the change: our app used to be installed in /usr/share, and when we got the report we realized about the change in electron-installer-debian.

That was not a very serious problem, but discussing this further actually made us think that our app should be in /opt according to the guidelines, and not in /usr/share or /usr/lib, but I couldn't find a way at all to do this with electron-installer-debian. Maybe I can rephrase this issue or open a different one, but the real limitation is that we are not able to choose where the app is installed using this tool.

Thanks, and sorry again for taking a couple of days to answer.

[dlech]

Since it is installed with a .deb package and it contains binary files, it belongs in /usr/lib/. If you install manually (e.g. from source), it would be correct to install in /usr/local/lib/ or /opt/. It is actually against debian policy to install in /opt/ from a .deb package.

[lurch]

This also caught us out in Etcher balena-io/etcher#1290

Perhaps this change-of-path in 0.5.0 ought to be mentioned somewhere prominent in the README?

[unindented]

@lurch you are right. I'll try to add a note in the README.

[fcastilloec]

@malept could you also change the README to point out where the .deb is installed so we can close this issue?