Installation dependent on repo?

[jmafc]

I know it's still not 1.0, but it seems that after the v executable is built from source, it cannot be copied somewhere else, e.g., to $HOME/bin, but instead it has to be symlinked back to the repo. If you simply copy it, v init for example, hangs for a while and then panics because it can't find cmd/tools/vcreate. The downloadable .zip files appear to be copies of the entire repo, regardless of actual destination platform. I think it ought to be customized, at least before the 1.0 release.

[JalonSolov]

By keeping it all together, V doesn't require you to set 1/2 dozen env vars in order to use it. When you start V running, it "knows" the directory it was run from, and looks for cmd, vlib, thirdparty, etc., etc. in that same directory.

[jmafc]

There are plenty of languages, tools and apps that install themselves in "standard" directories, e.g., under /usr/local/{bin,lib,..} or under a user's home or explicitly given directory, without requiring any env vars to be set.

[JalonSolov]

... and perhaps V will migrate to that model once it is closer to v1.0. For now, what we have is simple and works. It may not fit everyone's idea of how to lay things out, but "it ain't broke" as it is.

Also, just because those standard directories are used on most Linux distros (not all), and the user installing something has access to write there (via sudo or whatever), doesn't mean they're available on every OS that V runs on (Windows, for example). There's all the XDG_ vars to take into account, if they exist, etc., etc. Don't get me started on NixOS, where nobody has write access to those directories... you have to have an official Nix package to be able to put anything in them.

So while it may be possible, it will take some work to ensure any new layout works everywhere, or enough special cases are added to help things along.

[jmafc]

I does get broke if someone thinks: I just created the v executable, so I'll just copy or move it somewhere that is already in my path, because I don't want to keep an executable in a source repo. My point is that the installation from source instructions perhaps ought to emphasize that you should keep it where it was created and at most, symlink it elsewhere.
It currently says

you should find your V executable at [path to V repo]/v. [path to V repo] can be anywhere.

It does not say you shouldn't copy it or move it elsewhere (because it depends on the existence of various items in that repo).

[jmafc]

I see now that, further down on the README, v itself has a symlink subcommand which on UNIX-like systems, creates a symlink on /usr/local/bin, which does require root privs, but wouldn't it be much easier for to say that you need to use ln -s to somewhere on your path, like under a user's home dir, which would not require root privs? And, hasn't Windows also supported symbolic links in recent releases, like since Vista?

[JalonSolov]

v symlink already works on Windows, it just does something different from what v symlink does on Linux/Mac.