Rox is an odd ball when it comes to packaging and building. That has to do with rox' promoted zero_install system, that allows rox-* styled packages just installed as drop in. Moving binaries around just makes the package more error prone. Which is why we have a shell script that starts ROX-Filer. ROX- works around FHS in all kind of places, fixing it is not our business.

OK, I understand, this is bad. So maybe should be installed under /opt that is the proper location for packages that don't follow FHS recomendations? or installing in /opt breaks something?

PS: This task was openned because of a recent discusion on a mailing list about /usr/share [#1]

[#1] http://www.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-general/2009-June/006060.html

it's not that easy either, because also the build process is rather unique, to put it nicely. Seriously, I rather don't touch rox, even though it has a binary is in /usr/share there are a lot of errors waiting IMHO for a little bit of standard compliance in a very non standard compliant package. It's my favourite file manager and it has a lot of useful features, but I dislike the install way of rox very much.

mmm, seems to work fine moving to /opt/

patch againt svn trunk, also fixes $startdir variables.

Well, rox is not self contained and not proprietary, it doesn't really fit into /opt. I also don't see how only the binaries got to opt and the man files in the normal system path. Technically, the main binary of ro is the shell script we dump into /usr/bin/rox everything within /usr/share is rox' business.
I would really prefer with the it ain't broken so don't fix it approach here.

mmm I am confused with the comments, Is the PKGBUILD that do all the work of copying the files, all ROX related files, man pages, ROX build system does nothing here.
Anyway the buildsystem uses the env var DISTDIR, that isn't used PKGBUILD, because it does this manually as you know.

So I can not see what is the business of rox in this case. :( You have all the control.

btw: with the changes this is how rox pkg looks [#1]

[#1] http://djgera.pastebin.com/m59a3ffbc

Also /usr/share/Choices/ can be moved if your prefer to /opt passing --sysconfdir to APPrun wrapper to configure script.

So the only files that will remain in /usr will be .desktop and icon files, what is wrong with this?

It sounds like Tobias, the maintainer, is in favor of leaving this as-is, and he's the one who would be doing the initial and ongoing maintenance work.

Accordingly, I will close as "won't implement" on April 2010 bug day unless something else happens.