Re: compile failure

[Travis Saling <trav u washington edu>]

> If you do ./configure with no arguments, the results will end
> up in /usr/local, because this is traditionally where you stick
> stuff that was locally compiled. 

Of course this can lead to problems, at least if you're a bit dim like
me. If you're not careful you can end up with earlier versions of a
library etc. in /usr/local/..., and then have mysterious failings later.

I've built not-yet-released software from tarball, and then later
grabbed RPMs when they became available (Evolution springs to mind, but
this has happened once or twice with other software). RPMs install stuff
into /usr/bin and /usr/lib and so on, while of course from tarball
you're putting it by default into /usr/local/bin and /usr/local/lib.
Since /usr/local... is ahead of /usr... in the path, well you probably
see the picture.

Unfortunately "make uninstall" is often not defined, even if you manage
to keep your original source tree available. Not that I have the disk
space to do that anyway!

Since I am running Linux on my personal computer, I now just use
"--prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc" all the time to avoid most of these
issues. In any case it's a rather artificial division between /usr...
and /usr/local... IMNSHO - some old-school-Unix'ers feel pre-packaged
stuff that's not essential to the machine's operation (like Gnome)
should still go in /usr/local.  Of course they don't believe in packages
anyway, they'd prefer you write everything from scratch in binary
(opcode is for weasels).

-- 
Travis Saling
Webmaster, UW Electrical Engineering
trav u washington edu / webmaster ee washington edu
(206) 543-8984