Libranet

[Gerald Combs]

On Fri, 27 Apr 2001, Brian Densmore wrote:

> Then you should only get programs on that partition that are part of the OS,
> granted some programs like to install themselves in the /bin directory, but
> that is bad behavior. Most "user" programs go into the /usr or /opt trees.

Many packages use GNU autoconf to determine the system environment and
specify options at compile time.  Autoconf generates the "configure"
script that many packages require you to run before running "make". Its
default installation location is /usr/local.  You can change the install
path by feeding "--prefix=<path>" to the "configure" script.  For example,
Red Hat uses /usr as the prefix for most of their packages, which is why
GNU ls is in /usr/bin on Red Hat systems instead of /usr/local/bin (where
it installs by default on my Solaris systems).

If you wanted to install a software package in a specific directory, _and_
that package used autoconf (or something similar), _and_ you didn't mind
compiling everything yourself, you could do

  ./configure --prefix=<path>
  make
  make install

for each package.  

Feeding a custom prefix to "configure" can be handy for upgrades as well.
For example, I currenly have Apache 1.3.17 installed in
/usr/local/apache-1.3.17.  When I upgrade to 1.3.19, it will be installed
in (you guessd it) /usr/local/apache-1.3.19.  From there, it's a simple
matter to copy the config files from the old directory to the new one.  
Switching to the new version (and reverting to the old one if needed)
becomes trivial at that point.

> 
> Brian Densmore
> Associate
> densmoreb at ctbsonline.com
> CompuTech Business Solutions, Inc.
> http://www.ctbsonline.com/
> 
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