David, Thank you very very much for your detailed reply. It certainly did help.
Generally, the recommendation is to use "ConfigureMe", which is our (heartbeat) high-level wrapper around "configure". Heartbeat embeds itself quite deeply into the OS, and generally needs several "--xxx=yyy" things (as you show!). So "ConfigureMe" is intended to do that automatically for known OSes. (I believe that Ubuntu is a variant of Debian, isn't it? In that case, there is a good chance that "ConfigureMe" should do the right thing for you... except the detail you ask below!)
The reason I intially ignored ConfigureMe was twofold. In the first case, the "help" you get by running ./ConfigureMe without any options gives you no indication what so ever that you can pass in your own --enable type options. All it says is ./ConfigureMe configure|make|install|package etc. This is a significant issue for me, because for the system I'm trying to build heartbeat on, I need to pass in several custom options and it wasn't immediately obvious that I could do that, so I fell back to the good old faithful ./configure routine. I discovered experimentally that if I did ./ConfigureMe install --enable-snmp-subagent then it would include that option in the ./configure process.
I think open-source developers would agree that editing "/etc/passwd" (or doing 'useradd') is a step too far for a normal 'make install'.
ok, I understand fully what you're saying and agree that leaving out this step is the most appropriate decision. What I think needs to happen then is for this to be made clear to the average joe who is compiling this for their own system. I'm not compiling heartbeat to make packages or anything like that. I'm compiling it because I have a heavily customised system that needs to be running heartbeat. If I may, I'd like to add a couple of entries to your list of suggestions: 1. The --enable-snmp-subagent capability is missing from the output of ./configure --help. It is a valid option and should be documented. 2. Adjust the output of ./ConfigureMe to make it clear that it is possible to add configure flags beyond those that are chosen by default for the particular system. (Case in point is my own configure line which has options not included in the default debian flags). 3. Document the fact (perhaps include with the summary that's printed out at the end of the ./configure phase - even when using ./ConfigureMe this output is visible) that the user needs to be responsible for the creation of the hacluster and haclient user/group. Thanks again for your response! H. _______________________________________________ Linux-HA mailing list [email protected] http://lists.linux-ha.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-ha See also: http://linux-ha.org/ReportingProblems
