Re: Installing gnome the easy way.

[Havoc Pennington <rhpennin midway uchicago edu>]

On Sat, 24 Oct 1998, Michael Meeks wrote:
> 	I hate to add traffic saying merely Amen!. How hard would it
> be to add an idiot mode to configure that, checks / removes:
> 
> 	a) Old header files,
> 	b) Old libraries
> 	c) Old vital files: <prefix>/aclocal/* etc.
>

This couldn't be done without possibly breaking the system, which would be
bad.
 
The solution is this. Normally, Red Hat and Debian (at least) will never
install anything under /usr/local or /opt. These are for your use. 

What you want to do is create a directory under one of these called gnome,
for example /opt/gnome. Then use:

ACLOCAL_FLAGS='-I /opt/gnome/share/aclocal' ./autogen.sh --prefix=/opt/gnome

do this for every Gnome package.You will need to add /opt/gnome/lib
to /etc/ld.so.conf, or have each user of Gnome do:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/gnome/lib

Probably you will also want:
export PATH=$PATH:/opt/gnome/bin

and for good measure (probably not needed due to the *-config scripts):
export C_INCLUDE_PATH=/opt/gnome/include

When you want to install a new Gnome or are having mysterious problems,

/bin/rm -rf /opt/gnome

and start over. If *that* doesn't work, in each directory, 'rm
config.cache', 'make clean', and redo autogen.sh.

*Never* mix stuff you compile yourself with stuff handled by the packaging
system; always put your stuff in /usr/local or /opt so you can delete it
without breaking any of the packaged stuff. This way you don't ever need
to reinstall. /usr should not be used as a prefix.

On my single-user system, I even like to put Gnome in ~/local, because 
then I don't have to su root to make install, and I know for sure I'm not
interfering with the workings of the system.

Havoc