Dealing with uninstalled data

[Victor Porton]

What is the best way to debug a program which uses some data files,
while the program is not yet installed?

For example I have data/classes.ttl to be installed into
/usr/local/share/boiler/classes.ttl

How can I make my program to use this classes.ttl while it is not yet
installed?

Maybe, I should lookup in current directory? But that's insecure. Maybe
I should lookup in current directory only in maintainer mode?

[Mathieu Lirzin]

Hello,

Post by Victor Porton
What is the best way to debug a program which uses some data files,
while the program is not yet installed?
For example I have data/classes.ttl to be installed into
/usr/local/share/boiler/classes.ttl
How can I make my program to use this classes.ttl while it is not yet
installed?
Maybe, I should lookup in current directory? But that's insecure. Maybe
I should lookup in current directory only in maintainer mode?

I would recommend using environment variables to override the default
installed directories. To run you program from build directory can then
use a wrapper script that sets those environment variables appropriately
and call your progam this script can be used for running tests too. As
an example you can see the 'pre-inst-env' script of Automake [1] which
is generated at configure time.

HTH,