Re: make sysinstall/Makefile.preamble/GNUSTEP_INSTALLATION_DOMAIN

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 15 Dec 2008, at 11:26, David Chisnall wrote:

> On 15 Dec 2008, at 11:18, Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:
>
> > On 15 Dec 2008, at 11:00, David Chisnall wrote:
> > > I still don't fully understand the rationale for moving system  
> > > packages out of System.
> >
> > That would be because system packages haven't been moved out of  
> > System there's no plan to ever move them.
>
> Okay, that's good to here.
>
> > What's happened is a change to avoid people (GNUstep newbies in  
> > particular) accidentally overwriting system packages with their non- 
> > system locally built versions.
>
> Often this is the desired behaviour when building locally.  If I  
> have installed GNUstep from ports then compile it myself, I want  
> applications installed subsequently, from ports or manually, to link  
> against the new version, since it typically works better than the  
> old one (and if it doesn't, then I can look for bugs more easily if  
> more things are using it).

That's exactly why, if you build locally, the default install location  
is the local domain ... it avoids trashing the existing system  
installation but also ensures that any subsequently built software  
will be linked with the new version, since the path and link path  
contain the various domains in the correct order (user then local then  
network then system).

> Perhaps the best solution would be to provide a script which set the  
> prefix.  When compiling stuff myself that I don't want to interfere  
> with system packages, I typically run configure --prefix=/opt/ 
> $PACKAGE_NAME (it's a bit of a SysV thing to do, but simplifies  
> things a lot).

Usually you don't need to, since most free software packages come with  
a default prefix of /usr/local (though I think you use bsd, and things  
might be different there I suppose) so that when installed they don't  
trash the system versions in /usr.  That is to say, the normal  
behavior is that you have to do 'configure --prefix=/usr' if you are  
going to want to overwrite the system version of the package.  Nicola  
designed the GNUstep-make behavior to follow that same patter of  
installing 'safely' by default, and overwritign your system only if  
you tell it to.

> Presumably I can do the same thing with GNUstep Make and just make  
> sure I source the correct version of GNUstep.sh from there?  I've  
> not actually tried having two copies of GNUstep Make installed, so  
> I'm not sure...

Having two copies of GNUstep make configured with different filesystem  
layouts can certainly work.