What is going on ? and RPM question

[Mathias Puetz]

>|But what's wrong with installing KDE in /usr or in /bluemoon or whatever ?
>
>actually, installing it in /bluemoon makes more sense than installing it in 
>/usr. let's say that you build from tarball. you build kdesupport and do make 
>install. you build kdelibs and do make install. and then kdebase blows up. 
>won't build. needs something. you now don't have a working kde. and because the 
>thing is thrown into /usr, and not, say, /usr/kde, there was no way for you to 
>have backed up your old, working kde so that you can now restore it. what is 
>normally in /opt/kde/lib is now in /usr/lib. what is normally in /opt/kde/bin 
>is now in /usr/bin. thanks to redhat, you now have one hell of a mess. at the 
>very minimum, redhat now ties the user to rpms, because that's just about the 
>only way to safely upgrade anything that involves more than one package.
>
Well, if you want to install from source, it's easy for you to
uninstall the Redhat RPMS and put KDE wherever you want it.
Thanks, to the the KDE developers I no longer need (and no longer want !)
to build anything in the KDE base dist. myself (because it's stable now)
and I'm happy with the RPMS Redhat provides. And any addition to KDE
(like kdevelop) I have built so far happily lives in /usr-space.
So I don't follow your argument. I you are a developer
you usually like to have the source from CVS anyway so you probably
don't want to use the binary RPMS in the first place. That's fine,
but then those people know what they are doing.
*Ordinary* users who just want to use the binaries don't care where
the binaries are as long as they work.
But hell, if you don't like RedHat, there's tons of other distributions
you may choose from. Apparently, I do like it despite it's *shortcomings*.
But I grant that it was very short-sighted of RedHat to install both
QT's and not make QT-1.44 the default one, since that's what most people
would expect it to be.

Nonetheless, I have a different question to those people out there who make
RPMS. RPM supports relocation of packages. Is there a mechanism in RPM
to automatically change the default installation tree with RPM.
Say on RedHat KDE goes to /usr , on Suse to /opt/kde , on XYZ to /usr/local/kde.
Isn't that possible to decide within the install scripts of a RPM package ?
If I remember correctly there is a variable called 'install_root'. Couldn't
this variable simply be changed to the right directory for a given distribution ?
If so, this would resolve a lot of the problems people have with RPMS.
I know it's a PITA that one has to take care of these details and there's
no *standard* way, but all the rants about doing it the *right* or the *wrong*
won't get us very far.

Mathias

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| Mathias Puetz \__________________________________
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| Advanced Materials Lab (University of New Mexico) \
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