16 Aug
2005
16 Aug
'05
11:19 p.m.
On 8/17/05, Erik Steffl <steffl(a)bigfoot.com> wrote:
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
? 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).