[MPlayer-users] Re: Commercial detection (was: Re: Can mencoder write partialfiles w hile encoding?)

[D Richard Felker III]

On Fri, Aug 29, 2003 at 06:11:35PM -0500, Jonathan Rogers wrote:
> [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]
> The Wanderer wrote:
> >He also has apparently decided that installing -devel packages so that 
> >he can install something which is depended on by something he wants is 
> >more rearranging, and possible breaking, of his system than he's willing 
> >to risk for such a comparatively minor purpose.
> >
> >Depending on how much would need to be replaced, and how much might be 
> >broken, by such a rearrangement, I would probably want to go 
> >considerably further before saying "Okay, this is too much hassle for 
> >too little benefit". He is, however, entitled to his own opinion on the 
> >matter.
> 
> I can certainly understand wanting to avoid global changes to a working 
> system. I don't like installing things globally outside of the package 
> system, so I've been compiling and installing experimental packages 
> (like mplayer CVS) in my home directory. That way, the changes can be 
> easily reversed. However, this approach can be a hassle for libraries, 
> since one has to pass extra paths to configure scripts and possibly 
> change environment variables like LD_LIBRARY_PATH. It's just a matter of 
> how much extra work one is willing to put into it; it may not be worth 
> it unless one plans to get heavy use out of the tool. Whether it's worth 
> the hassle is certainly an individual decision.

Just use /usr/local. The whole point of /usr/local is that your
package system shouldn't mess with it, and installing stuff there
won't mess up your package system. The only possible exception is if
you install a newer version of a dynamic library, and one of your
packaged programs then uses the new version and fails because of
version incompatibility, but that shouldn't happen, since libs with
new abi should be given a new major version number (or if they change
frequently like libavcodec they should not be built dynamic at all!).

Rich