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

[Allan Third <allan grelb src gla ac uk>]

> On Thu, 11 Feb 1999, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > On Thu, 11 Feb 1999, Allan Third wrote:
> > > 
> > > 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?
> > >
> > 
> > There's no point installing a package to /opt/gnome because you can remove
> > packages using the rpm tool. That's what packages are for, in large part -
> > so you don't have /opt/everythingunderthesun. The /opt/gnome suggestion is 
> > if you're compiling yourself.

I agree that it's easier to use rpm to handle the whole thing, but my
system's become a bit of a mess - some things have been installed with rpm,
some have been compiled from source (as in when there are no RPMs), etc., so
some things are in /usr/local (those done from source, generally) whereas
some are in /usr. I've done my best to uninstall everything I can (easy in
the case of RPMS, hard when you've lost the source tarball due to disk space
reasons) and it's primarily in order to avoid future messes of this nature
that I'd like to install to /opt/gnome, so that I can just rm -rf
everything if necessary, as Todd Lewis said in a previous reply to my
question.

> With the way GNOME is built currently, automatically relocatible RPMs are
> essentially impossible to make.  They should be very easily manually
> relocatable.  First, configure your system to accept an /opt/gnome
> installation (eg. /opt/gnome/bin in the path, /opt/gnome/lib in
> ld.so.conf).  Then, for each package, in compile order, do the following
>   * Take the SRPM (glib) and install it.
>   * Go to /usr/src/redhat/SPECS, and edit the spec file (glib.spec) so
>     that the %prefix line points to "/opt/gnome" instead of "/usr"
>   * Build the RPM from the new spec file
>   * Install the RPM from /usr/src/redhat/BUILD/<arch>
>   * Repeat for the next SRPM
> 
> The %prefix variable should get passed to all the right places, so the
> binary RPM, while still not relocatable as far as rpm is concerned, is now
> properly located in the different directory.

That's what I was hoping to be able to do, and it all seemed to be OK, but I
wasn't sure how adding %prefix would affect the %build section - would I
have to alter the arguments given to configure, or would rpm do this
automatically? My guess is that it wouldn't, but I wasn't sure, and given
that I don't fully understand all of the arguments that are there, I thought
I'd better hold off a while, and seek expert advice! :-) I'd give examples
of the things I don't understand, but I'm not using my own machine right
now. I'll look them up when I get home, though.

Thanks, 

Allan

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Allan Third (allan@mindless.com)

"It's raining popcorn. Hallelujah!"