On 15 Dec 2008, at 11:26, David Chisnall wrote:
On 15 Dec 2008, at 11:18, Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:
On 15 Dec 2008, at 11:00, David Chisnall wrote:
I still don't fully understand the rationale for moving system
packages out of System.
That would be because system packages haven't been moved out of
System there's no plan to ever move them.
Okay, that's good to here.
What's happened is a change to avoid people (GNUstep newbies in
particular) accidentally overwriting system packages with their non-
system locally built versions.
Often this is the desired behaviour when building locally. If I
have installed GNUstep from ports then compile it myself, I want
applications installed subsequently, from ports or manually, to link
against the new version, since it typically works better than the
old one (and if it doesn't, then I can look for bugs more easily if
more things are using it).
That's exactly why, if you build locally, the default install location
is the local domain ... it avoids trashing the existing system
installation but also ensures that any subsequently built software
will be linked with the new version, since the path and link path
contain the various domains in the correct order (user then local then
network then system).
Perhaps the best solution would be to provide a script which set the
prefix. When compiling stuff myself that I don't want to interfere
with system packages, I typically run configure --prefix=/opt/
$PACKAGE_NAME (it's a bit of a SysV thing to do, but simplifies
things a lot).
Usually you don't need to, since most free software packages come with
a default prefix of /usr/local (though I think you use bsd, and things
might be different there I suppose) so that when installed they don't
trash the system versions in /usr. That is to say, the normal
behavior is that you have to do 'configure --prefix=/usr' if you are
going to want to overwrite the system version of the package. Nicola
designed the GNUstep-make behavior to follow that same patter of
installing 'safely' by default, and overwritign your system only if
you tell it to.
Presumably I can do the same thing with GNUstep Make and just make
sure I source the correct version of GNUstep.sh from there? I've
not actually tried having two copies of GNUstep Make installed, so
I'm not sure...
Having two copies of GNUstep make configured with different filesystem
layouts can certainly work.
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