DJ Lucas wrote: > Guys and gals, > > Is there any real desire to support the optional installation prefixes > of X, QT, Gnome, and KDE in the book after package management enters? > Maybe I'm just being lazy, but at this point, I kinda view it as an > unnecessary maintenance burden. Not to mention that the idea of > building Gnome and various groups of dependents 2 more times is a bit > unattractive, (it's scripted after the first run so it's not like it's a > huge pile of work, just takes background time). That's probably even > extreme as I chose to do the most difficult pattern first. The minor > changes needed for this variant aren't likely to affect the other 3 > possible combinations, but I'll do at least the easy one once anyway for > validation. > > I imagine the same difficulty occurs with maintaining QT, KDE, and later > KDE-4. I'm not sure about supporting both KDE-3 and KDE-4.
In my case, I need to have qt3 and qt4 installed simultaneously at least for the next year or two. I support an application that uses qt3 and am porting it to qt4 (probably a full year's project). The headers and libraries of the two don't conflict, but the applications, especially qmake, do. IMO, placing qt/kde/gnome in /opt is an important technique for users to be able to experiment with multiple versions with the ability to back up to a previous working version when (not if) a build problem is not detected until the system is running. > AFAIK, our counterparts all install in /usr. > With package management coming, it > shouldn't be any more difficult I suppose, but even more unnecessary IMO > now that I actually use what I consider to be a good package management > scheme. The only downside I see to dropping optional prefixes, is our > value to upstream in not revealing bugs in configure scripts that might > affect someone else. AFAIK, we've always been good at finding the out > of the ordinary bugs and upstreaming patches or docs. Our audience is quite a bit different from the typical distro. Our users experiment with build flags, specific components installed, and deciding what non-mandatory dependencies to install. I even hesitate to install X in /usr because I don't want to drop back to the command line when something goes wrong. -- Bruce -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
