Re: Installation-issues

[Adrian Ratnapala <s369625@student.uq.edu.au>]

On Wed, 9 Dec 1998, Jan Ekholm wrote:

> 
> I was wondering what is the policy regarding installation of software
> nowadays. More specificly, where should software packages install
> themselves? I'm doing the final touches on a package right now and need
> some input. I have a lot of includes thet the user needs to access, two
> shared libraries as well as static versions of these, some binaries, a lot
> of samples, documentation (html), man-pages and so on. I have two options
> that I've found to be ok :

The best sullution for users is to use proper package management 
softwer like RPM,  or dpkg.  Otherwise...
> 
> 1. Drop it all on / and let it flow down to /usr/lib, /usr/bin,
> /etc, /usr/include, /usr/doc and so on. Easiest way for the application
> programmer who uses my system, but bad as it fills up /usr.
> 
> 2. Create an directory in /opt and put it all there. Very easy for me, but
> harder for the application programmer, as he/she must manually tell the
> compiler where the libs & includes that will be used reside.
> 

Well, if you are talking sources, play games with autoconf, it
lets the user decide what to do.  Binaries are harder.

On my system I wanted to install some software without polluting
my nice shiny new /usr.  So what I did was installed it to a 
directory under /opt, then I wrote a script which semi-recursively
symlinks these to /usr/local.  Now if the /opt/thispackage
directory is deleted the broken links are easy to find.  I could
improve the script to automate more of the process. 

The problems are:
	* Inefficiency (no big deal).
	* LD_LIBRARY_PATH must contain /usr/local/lib under
	Linux because the ldconfig does not like sysmlinks.
	This probably has security implications I do not understand.

Sorry I can't give you my script, it is on my box at home, and
I am on the other side of the world right now.  If you distribute
such as script, the user need not use it,  he could just untar
in / and live with it that way.

> The system in question here is 'Zombie', or basically a totally
> reincarnated version. Any ideas as to what should be done? What's the PP
> policy on this matter?

Penguin Play Primary Packaging Policy:

	The PenguinPlay team wishes its product was in a stage
	of development in which it needed to care about such issues.

Penguin Play Secondary Packaging Policy:

	"My, doesn't the primary polciy have a nice acronnym".

More seriously we had some discussions about similar issues.
I'll see if I can find them and forward them to you.