[MPlayer-users] Re: installing outside distribution package control OT: Commercial detection (was: Re: Can mencoder write partialfiles w hile encoding?)

[zimon@iki.fi]

On Fri, Aug 29, 2003 at 08:33:46PM -0400, D Richard Felker III wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 29, 2003 at 06:11:35PM -0500, Jonathan Rogers wrote:
> > I can certainly understand wanting to avoid global changes to a working 
> > system. I don't like installing things globally outside of the package 
> 
> 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, 

I would  say libraries no not make exception here, as you can add 
/usr/local/lib into your /etc/ld.so.conf file. (and run ldconfig after that)

I myself usually use checksintall < http://checkinstall.izto.org > ¹
to install some tar package as a "fake" RPM package to the system, but if not,
then I install for example libs needed by program "foo" to 
/usr/local/lib/foo/ and then put "/usr/local/lib/foo/"
to /etc/ld.so.conf

That way I later can know if some libraries already could be removed from
/usr/local/lib, as perhaps the same newer version of the library has 
already come with distribution updates or if I have stopped using program
"foo" and removed it.

Ofcourse if then some other program "bar" outside packaging system also 
needs the newer library before it has come with the distribution updates,
then I may not notice to change the directory name of "/usr/local/lib/foo"
to "/usr/local/lib/foo-bar/" and later I may not know about all dependencies
when I remove the program "foo" and I think I could remove /usr/local/lib/foo
also. But haven't figured out any better system either...except to use
checkinstall¹ or quickly manually edit a skeleton template SPEC file and
make a RPM package.

[This starts to be totally OT of MPlayer]

(I regret I didn't rename the Subject-field of my 
"long options should be getopt_long() --long-options" letter.)