Dealing with uncooperative program file locations

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Apologies if this is kinda hectic, but I’ve been at this for a couple hours now.
I’m trying to make a ghidra-server package/module, and I got the build (download) process working, but ghidra stores it’s logs/config in the installation folder which it can’t do for logs it’s in the nix store.
And for the config files it would make editing the config via a module (ie programs/service.ghidra-server._) impossible.
To change the log location I’d need to change the config file, and to change the config file location I’d need to change the script that starts the server.

So I have a couple questions:

  1. Is it good practice to patch decently big chunks of files or is it better to just download the modified script from somewhere (ie gist)?
  2. Where do I even put them in the end, I could make a folder in something like /var/ghidra, or is it better to point it to the home directory of the currently running user?
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Hey there, welcome to the community!

  1. If the changes in question are so significant that they mean a file rewrite, I’d deploy it next to the package definition, as usually done with patch files.
  2. Personally I don’t think it matters much, but that sounds like material for a PR discussion. Why not just create a PR and see what people think?
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Logs often go into stdout if they’re being run as a daemon; that way journald can manage them. Stateful data files tend to go in /var/lib/$program/. Sometimes logs can go there.

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Thank you for the quick responses.
I’ll create a PR when I clean it up a bit.