Re: [Pan-users] Re: ubuntu 0.117 binaries

[Søren Boll Overgaard]

Hi

On Sat, Oct 21, 2006 at 01:17:58AM +0000, Duncan wrote:
> 
> > I have compiled plenty... but I guess i avoided it in this instance because
> > of a few fuzzy bits:
> > 
> > if you have a deb installed for a package, should you uninstall it before
> > installing from source?
> > if you don't will your dpkg package inventory be hosed?
> > how do you uninstall source? make uninstall? if so, does that mean you have
> > to retain the source in order to uninstall it?
> 
> I'd uninstall before installing from source, yes.  It shouldn't hose
> anything up (besides the record for pan, but that's the point) if you
> don't; just what the system thinks is installed won't be, and I prefer to
> keep it consistent.

I may be misreading your statement, but do you mean to say that the dpkg
managed install will get hosed by a source install?

If that is the case, it's only partially true. Debian (and therefore Ubuntu)
adheres to very strict rules regarding where files are installed. Ordinary user
binaries (such as pan) are installed in /usr/bin. Installing the source under
/usr/local (by providing the --prefix option to configure) will ensure that the
two installations don't interfere with eachother in any way.

> Uninstalling source is an interesting question.  Some source tarballs come
> with a make uninstall step, but it's not common yet.  For pan, however, it
> shouldn't be a big issue as pretty much the only thing installed is the
> executable itself, some icons, a .desktop menu entry file, and perhaps a
> few files in doc/pan-<version>/. Delete those and you've pretty much
> deleted the entire thing. Because nothing installed has version numbers in
> the filename (except for the dir for the docs), installing a new
> package version over top of the source version should get everything back
> in shape (provided you installed to the same path when you used source, I
> think it defaults to /usr/local/ and the deb probably installs to /usr/).

If you install to /usr/bin/ from source, you definitely want to remove
everything pan-related manually before attempting to install a dpkg managed
version of pan.

As for uninstalling source installs: That's about the best conceivable argument
in favor of using package managers there is. Having to manually clean up after
a source install is annoying, boring and error-prone (although pan is a small
enough package to make it feasible).

> The packages you'd have to worry about would be stuff like shared object
> library packages, which are normally versioned in the filename itself, so
> installing a new version won't overwrite the old one.  Having multiple
> lib versions installed can be an issue when the wrong ones get used at
> times, as well, tho Linux is generally much saner about that than say
> MSWormOS with its dll versioning hell.

Again an excellent argument in favor of using package managers rather than
source installs.

Ok, so, I might be a bit biased in favor of package managers and binary
packages, but hey :)


-- 
Søren O.

"Oh, bother" said the Borg, "we've assimilated Pooh".