Re: /opt/gnome? (Newbie-ish question)

[Todd Graham Lewis <tlewis mindspring net>]

On Thu, 11 Feb 1999, Allan Third wrote:

> I've been playing around with GNOME for a while now, and I've noticed that a
> large number of the webpages/FAQs, etc. recommend installing it under
> /opt/gnome. I've just recently uninstalled GNOME, in the hope of doing a
> completely clean reinstall, and I'd like to take this advice, in order to
> keep all the files for GNOME in the same place, to make this sort of thing a
> lot easier in the future. What I'm wondering, though, is why all the RPMs
> all automatically install to /usr or /usr/local, and none of them appear to
> be relocatable. Surely, if it's *possible* to do an /opt/gnome install,
> there wouldn't be any problem creating RPMs which could be relocated? Does
> anyone know why this is not done?

Two things:

1) I recommend in that FAQ using /opt/gnome mostly to cover up for the
fact that I do not use any packaging.  This way, since I can't rpm -e
the software, I can rm -rf it.  Thus, with packaging, most of the rationale
for putting software in /opt goes away.

2) Making packages relocatable is not impossible, but it is tedious.  Given
that there is no real reason not to put the stuff in /usr/local, other than
mere taste, the volunteers who do the packaging probably just don't want to
waste their time on it.  I don't blame them.

> I do have all the SRPMS from ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/redhat/latest, and I'd
> be willing to build them myself, but my knowledge of rpm is extremely
> limited, and I don't know how to modify the spec files to create relocatable
> packages. Has anyone done this, and if so, could they tell me how I could do
> it?

Every place where you have a location dependency in your package, make it
location independent.  The details vary from package to package.  8^)

If you have a favorite relocatable package which is fairly complex, use it
as a template.

Good luck!

--
Todd Graham Lewis            32°49'N,83°36'W          (800) 719-4664, x2804
******Linux******         MindSpring Enterprises      tlewis@mindspring.net

"A pint of sweat will save a gallon of blood."          -- George S. Patton