Johannes Lips (who packages gretl for Fedora) has pointed out to me that with the gretl 1.9.10 package the XDG files (desktop file, icons, mime types) don't get installed when you do a top-level "make install". This bug affects those who are building gretl from source for their use, and also packagers. In a sense this is easy to fix (just add gretl's xdg subdirectory to the list of SUBDIRS that get activated by "make install") but actually it raises some further issues and I'd like to hear people's views. Between the 1.9.9 and 1.9.10 releases I added up-to-date XDG support, but the way I implemented "make install" in the xdg subdir relies on the XDG tools (xdg-desktop-menu, xdg-mime, xdg-icon-resource). These are nice in that they handle both the case where they're invoked by root (in which case the icons and so on are installed to system locations) and the case where they're invoked by an unprivileged user (in which case the files go under ~/.local). Moreover, the installed locations of these files are guaranteed to be right -- so they're found by the desktop software -- unless the system itself is messed up. But... using these tools is not what a packager wants, since they won't respect DESTDIR. For packaging purposes we need to figure the correct locations in advance based on the installation prefix. For example, instead of doing # nice for regular people xdg-desktop-menu install gretl.desktop --novendor we need to do something like # packager-friendly $(INSTALL_DATA) gretl.desktop \ $(DESTDIR)$(prefix)/share/applications So, should we set up a choice between these methods in the configure script? If so, any suggestions on which should be the default (if there's a default) and how the option might be phrased? One possibility would be an "enable" switch: --enable-xdg-utils Use xdg-utils for installing XDG files which could either default to "no" or perhaps to "auto", based on whether or not xdg-desktop-menu is found. In the latter case a packager whose machine has xdg-utils installed would have to do --disable-xdg-utils. Allin Cottrell