Hi Richard, Richard Jones wrote: > > Where does the thinking come from that "there must be only one instance > > of every package"? > ... > My experience of the goodness of packaging systems comes from my use > of OSes like Minix and FreeBSD which don't have good (or any) > packaging systems, and require complete reinstallation after a short > period of time once the layers of cruft from multiple 'make install' > commands have built up.
Mike Frysinger wrote: > packages install way too much cruft that changes over versions to sanely > track > without a PM, and `make uninstall` is way too inconsistent and "helpful" to > even think about trusting. The solution to this problem is the 'Nix' package manager <http://nixos.org/>. It allows you have multiple versions or builds of a package installed, while at the same time having clear boundaries and clean uninstalls. I personally have been using a different --prefix for most package installations; you can call it a "poor man's Nix" approach. > > Where does the thinking come from that it is bad to have something not > > recognized by the package system? > > The packaging system manages security updates, that's one very big > reason. Indeed, if you want security updates, just building from source with "./configure && make && make install" will not provide them to you automatically. I'm not sure how we can address this issue? Bruno
