[PLUG] C programming

chris (fool) mccraw gently at gmail.com
Fri Aug 29 20:08:27 UTC 2008


On Fri, Aug 29, 2008 at 12:52 PM, Russell Senior
<russell at personaltelco.net> wrote:
>>>>>> "Dan" == Dan Young <danielmyoung at gmail.com> writes:
>
>>> Wonder why folks fear and avoid the 'configure; make; make install'
>>> dance.
>
> Dan> I don't fear 'make install', but I sure appreciate the lowered
> Dan> barrier to entry to trying new software provided by package
> Dan> management that lets me trivially remove it.
>
> I sometimes do 'configure --prefix=/packages/foo ; make ; make
> install', then I can trivially remove it with: 'rm -rf /packages/foo'

there are a ton of systems that facilitate this kind of behavior, some
of which i've used and loved:

gnu graft - http://freshmeat.net/projects/graft/ (makes symlink farms
from the private dir, uninstalls cleanly)
opt_depot - http://www.arlut.utexas.edu/csd/opt_depot/
(enterprise-grade multiplatform capable)

and then systems to take advantage of the fact that you can now have a
zillion versions of anything installed (yeah, i liked the old firefox
better, but would rather modify my environment to run it than making
an alias or naming the script firefox2): ...which was called
"modules", which is now ungoogle-able :/

i love setting things up this way myself.  i even re-abstracted some
packages so i could easily update the system version of glib and
others without yanking them out from under gnome (which i gave its own
private /packages/gnome/* hierarchy where i built a version of glib i
left alone).

truly, this system used to work better before the shenanigans with
library versioning and non-backward or forward compatibility crept
into the post-gnome world (freetype was a frequent offender, but glib
did it a few times too and so did some KDE-required libs).

due to all of those experiences, i have not tried to build gnome or
kde from source in the past 2 years, and do love my package manager
more...



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