Re: avoid wrapper scripts when possible

[Eric Bavier]

On Fri, 3 Nov 2017 18:54:16 +0000
Christopher Baines <address@hidden> wrote:

> However, I think that the file wrapping approach has advantages for
> visibility. Maybe it could be tweaked to keep ensure the wrapper script
> has the same name as the script its wrapping, e.g. when wrapping foo,
> replace foo with a bash script, and move the real script
> to .wrapped-bin/foo.

We already try to do just that, by using the -a flag when exec'ing the
real program from the wrapper.  But...

> the environment activation feature of our “conda” package currently
> fails.  This is because the “deactivate” shell script is wrapped in
> another shell script.  This leads to the actual shell script to be
> called “.deactivate-real”.  The script compares the value of “$0” with
> the expected name “deactivate”.  This fails so conda misbehaves.

... it doesn't behave correctly when the "real" program is
shebang-interpreted.  It works fine for compiled programs.  

E.g. our "emacs-25.3" is a wrapper that sets XDG and GTK env vars, but
top/htop/ps show the proper "emacs-25.3".  OTOH we have the
"deactivate" example from Ricardo, which is a shell script, and e.g.
youtube-dl, whose --help output includes "Usage: .youtube-dl-real ...".

So the interpreters are not passing on the intended zeroth argument.

IMHO it'd be nice to find some way to fix that.  A while ago I had
looked into patching Perl libraries/programs.  But like Hartmut
mentioned for python, I noticed after some research that patching perl
paths would be nontrivial, and would require a perl parser to determine
where and how to patch the library paths correctly.

2c,
`~Eric

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