What is going on ? and RPM question

[Ken Brakey]

Mathias Puetz wrote:

> >|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*

The *RIGHT* way = IT WORKS!
The *WRONG*way= It DON'T WORK
It's ALL a mater of personal preference WHERE
For the record I tried puting qt into /temp/qt-1.44 and it worked! SO, it doesn't
make any difference Where you put it, it's happy, just set the QTDIR to it,and
compile away.

BTW I had to change /etc/profile.d/qt.sh to reflect the correct directory.
Ken

>
> 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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