Application Packaging Developer's Guide

Making Absolute Path Names Look Relocatable

If you are going to construct a composite package, the absolute paths must operate in a manner which does not interfere with existing installed software. A package that can be entirely contained in /opt gets around this problem since there are no existing files in the way. When a file in /etc is included in the package, you must ensure that the absolute path names behave in the same way that is expected from relative path names. Consider the following two examples.