[linux-audio-user] Re: Gnome Wave Cleaner

David Cournapeau cournape at gmail.com
Tue Aug 16 21:19:33 EDT 2005


On 8/17/05, Erik Steffl <steffl at bigfoot.com> wrote:

> 
>    ? essentially I agree but why would uninstalling a program that was
> installed into ONE directory under /opt be a problem? There were
> obviously NO modifications to the system outside of that directory (I
> usually make sure of it by not installing as root)

If you don't use the approach described earlier (each software in its
own directory), and use configure --prefix=/usr/local instead, after
you install several programs there, you will have many files in
/usr/local/bin, many files in /usr/local/lib, etc.... So you have no
ways to remove only one software. If you use one directory per
software, then the problem is different (except concerning the
configuration files which go under ~ ).

> > Basically, installing from sources without the help of the package
> > manager is ok if nothing depends on what you are installing. It
> > quickly become unmanageable if other softwares depend on it.  I found
> > checkinstall much more robust.
> 
>    yeah, but installing into /opt/package-version works on pretty much
> all unix(like) OSs regardless of what package system you use. You're
> right that it's not a good general solution but it's pretty handy for
> small-scale installations (few programs and/or libs). Plus since
> everything goes into one directory you're pretty sure that the rest of
> the system is not affected (not sure how good is checkinstall in this
> area, it tries to check what the install did but I'd rather have install
> NOT touch the rest of the system, whether under supervision or not).
I am not a specialist of package management, but I know I installed
some big package from source with it (mono, for example), and it
worked flawlessly. I could remove it afterwards to fall back on an
official version.

I don't know if it depends on the package system, but with debian
packages, one package cannot overwrite a file from an other package,
except if you force it. That means for example that there is little
chance to destroy an existing package using a bleeding edge version
compiled from source and packaged by checkinstall.

Ideally, you should use an special user for testing big packages from
sources (to avoid destroying some configuration files).

David




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