Re: Glad to see interest in install/packaging

[Drazen Kacar <dave arsdigita com>]

David Elliott wrote:
> Morey Hubin wrote:

> RPM will not install a package if it contains the same file as another
> package.

But dpkg will. At least the older versions.

> Of course on Solaris none of that RPM stuff applies

But it does. There are people who use RPM to manage their software on
Solaris. I use dpkg, as well as some other people.

> Incidently, isn't Sun planning on including Gnome with newer
> releases of Solaris?  In that case I would see gnome being under /usr/bin or
> maybe go totally nuts like X Windows and put it in /usr/gnome/bin (i.e. like
> /usr/X11R6/bin)

Considering that Apache on Solaris 8 lives in {/usr,/etc,/var}/apache and
that Perl lives in /usr/perl5, I would expect /usr/gnome. Perhaps
/usr/gnome2.

> gnome-devel.  Really and truely why in the hell would you want more than one
> complete installed snapshot of gnome.

Because you are a developer. And you want your README to list the minimal
required versions of software your application depends on. If you maintain
more than one application, you might have different version requirements
for them. Or you might want to disable some features if the older version
of a library you depend on is installed. In any case, you'd have to do
some testing with different versions.

> >   Also keep in mind that ~/.gnome, ~/.gnome_private and ~/.enlightenment
> > keep absolute paths to themes, libs and other apps.  Changing from
> > /opt/gnome-1111 to /opt/gnome-2222 means that most of your user config
> > is gone and enlightenment stop working.  The enlightenment binary actually
> > remembers the path where it was installed.  If you move it then it ceases
> > to work.  It is not the only exec that does this but it is the most obvious.
> 
> Good call.  Along these same lines, should we consider using different
> ~/ directories for snapshot builds?  This will really screw people who
> want to switch between a working stable gnome in /usr and the snapshots
> in /opt/gnome-devel.  I am not so sure if I like this idea but I am
> throwing it out, maybe like ~/.gnome-devel, ~/.gnome_private-devel and
> so on.

I would argue that this is a software problem, missing feature at least
and maybe a bug. Consider automounted /home shared between Linux and
Solaris, for example. The binaries on Linux will most likely be somewhere
under /usr. The binaries on Solaris might be under /usr/local or /opt.
If user's ~/.whatever files reference absolute paths for the binaries,
this configuration is not going to work. And it should.

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