Re: [kde] setting an /opt precedent
On Thu, 2002-01-17 at 17:13, Jim Gettys wrote:
> My point is that often, in these large systems, you need both
> systems in parallel, simultaneously, both for developers and users.
Right. That's what I was referring to in regards to the work going on
in debian-gtk-gnome.
> You can't just say: "we'll only have one version of nautilus installed
> at once", for example; people, particularly on shared systems will need
> both versions available simultaneously.
>
> With advance planning, such projects can mitigate, but not eliminate
> these problems. Shared libraries have both helped and hurt
> this situation....
*Debian* can say that, in our official release. For example, I think
it's a foregone conclusion that woody will ship with GNOME 1.4 and KDE
2. Any support we happen to provide for GNOME 2 or KDE 3 will be
incidental (accidental?).
There have been cases where we have explicitly supported multiple
versions of large systems; see, for example, the Perl support in
potato. (And Perl is central to much of Debian's core infrastructure,
too, which complicates things; you can't install a Debian system without
perl.)
Sysadmins, of course, are free to override us by installing from source
to /usr/local or /opt, and developers can always track unstable, which
usually has one or two migration projects of this type going on at any
one time (freezes excepted).
> And I think Debian owes the KDE packaging folks some guidance on
> if not /opt, then where....
Well, maybe. Again, we don't mind KDE installing to /opt from source,
or even from their own debs that they distribute. It's our packages
that we're concerned about. As long as you can do "./configure
--prefix=/usr" or some such, we don't really care where they prefer to
install.
And if they can't do anything like "./configure --prefix=/usr", maybe we
can help give them that.
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