[Github-comments] [geany/geany] Run geany without installing it (#788)

[krisjace]

most portable way is to make paths relative to something known:
- to where the executable is (argv[0])
- to user's home folder ($HOME env var)
Lots of programs use PATH approach, where they define order at which they search path list. For example they start at (in your case) prefix, then (if not found) at relative path to user's home, then (if still failed) at the relative path to executable's directory, etc.

Yeah, the environmental variable would work well as well. And I agree with you that this is not a bug, but a feature request.

Notably I wanted to bring up a rarer example from what most people deal with in general, to defend the author of this issue. It may not be a very urgent need, but most definitely would make things easier.

I hoped that someone on this project would have free moment to review this, because I assumed that for someone who knows the structure of Geany's source code, this could be quite easy task. If you know what to look for, I imagines it almost Ctrl+F type of work, and replacing every occurrence of prefix constant in the source code with a function call, and finally writing that one function which would solve the path dynamically according to a logic like I suggested, where the prefix used to build would still have the highest priority, but on failure, there would be few other paths to check. In fact I could even myself write this kind of function, but I would need to know where to look for all the places that prefix is used, to replace it with the function call. Maybe someone would be willing to assist me, and we could have it done within next few days. I think that the value from this feature would by far exceed the time needed to implement it. Unless of course Geany code is not well structured, which I don't know.

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