[geeks] organization idea

[Gregory Leblanc]

On Wed, 2001-11-21 at 13:46, Joshua D Boyd wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 21, 2001 at 01:28:50PM -0800, Gregory Leblanc wrote:
> > It is.  It's called "package management".  When I want to get rid of my
> > gtk+ install I type 'apt-get remove gtk+', 'rpm -e gtk+', or 'pkgrm
> > gtk+'.  Sure, not exactly the approach above, but this one scales to an
> > infinite number of packages, and controls all of the files, not just the
> > ones that go into $prefix/bin.  Some people don't like package
> > management, but I find it to be essential for keeping any large number
> > of machines in-sync with the same package versions on all machines.  Not
> > sure what the arguments about it are, except maybe that people have had
> > trouble with poorly packaged software.  
> 
> Presumably, my system could easily by script to also deal with $PREFIX/man, 
> $PREFIX/lib/ etc.
> 
> And there are very good reasons why package managers can be problematic.  For
> instance, needing a custom compiled version of a library (like to get GTK to 
> work with a Wacom, since the guy who prepared the package forgot the 
> --with-xinput flag on the ./configure step), or needing to use a version of the
> software that hasn't been packaged yet (while most things have rpms, many, many
> things don't have .debs at this time).

I've not done much debian packaging, but RPM packaging is pretty easy,
even for a "newbie".  Download the SRPM, install it, edit the .spec file
and add --with-some-newfangled-option to the ./configure line, save, run
rpm -ba somepackage.spec, and install the resulting binary.  Debian is
supposed to support using RPMs, but I haven't actually tried that, since
most of the stuff that I've tried to use has already been packaged for
debian (in unstable, or testing, at least).
	Greg