On Monday 24 October 2005 20:07, Robert McGwier wrote: > KD7LMO has excellent instructions on how to build to a non global > libraries, etc. This prevents disruption of things that depend on the > base install versions. I know, it finally took a reinstall to > straighten my mess out.
While on the surface this seems to be a good idea, I have enough experience with these sorts of things to know that it is a bad idea from a maintainability standpoint. Been there, done that with PostgreSQL; maintained the RPMset for five years as a result. And while I don't want to belittle the effort put into those instructions (they do work well, after all), I do want to point out that many people simply think that's too much effort. They want the Regular Package Tools to Just Work. If I want to build a GNUradio RPMset (which is a goal) then the GNUradio stuff has to play nice with the dependency resolution system. Plus I have this thing against multiple versions of libraries taking up space that I need for other things (like radio observations). And installing specific items from source breaks the system's dependency resolution and vastly complicates system administration (I will end up with a dozen or more systems with GNUradio installed here; with yum and RPM's I can be assured all systems are identical and easily rebuilt from scratch in a rapid manner). I have enough complications with cfitsio, PSRCHIVE, and TEMPO without having to track yet more from-source packages. The ideal thing for me (and perhaps for GNUradio on RPM distributions) is the ability to point yum at a repository for GNUradio and issue 'yum install gnuradio-examples' and the system simply pulls everything needed for gnuradio-examples to run (but nothing more). The key is 'but nothing more'; suppose I want the text mode usrp GNUradio stuff, but don't want the gui at all. Simple enough to make happen in a yummable repository situation. For that matter, you point the Smartpm GUI or Synaptic at the repository (for synaptic, an apt repo would need set up) and select the pieces you want from the gui, and the depsolver Does The Right Thing and grabs what you need (and only what you need) to make it work. This is the NORMAL WAY packages are installed in the world of Fedora, Mandriva, SuSE, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, etc. For that matter, the same is true of Debian, just using .deb packages instead of RPM's. Point being that, if I don't want to have a compiler and development tools installed I don't have to (for instance, don't need SWIG except to build, don't need python-devel except to build, etc). Of course, if you want to build from source that is your prerogative. But a user shouldn't be forced to do so to use the system. -- Lamar Owen Director of Information Technology Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute 1 PARI Drive Rosman, NC 28772 (828)862-5554 www.pari.edu _______________________________________________ Discuss-gnuradio mailing list Discuss-gnuradio@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnuradio
