Re: gEDA-user: 20050329 install problem

[Daniel Nilsson <daniel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Apr 04, 2005 at 10:22:14AM -0400, Charles Lepple wrote:
> On Apr 4, 2005 12:52 AM, Gene Heskett <gene.heskett@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > On Sunday 03 April 2005 22:35, Marvin Dickens wrote:
> > >On Sunday 03 April 2005 20:24, Gene Heskett wrote:
> [...]
> > >> Thats called 'updatedb' on *most* distros.
> > >
> > >Yes, it is. However, it doesn't work as advertised on most distro's.
> > 
> > Oh?  It seems to be doing a crackerjack job of keeping my 'locate'
> > database in synch with reality here.
> 
> It's not the sort of thing you'd want to rely on at build time. If you
> had a new system with no development packages installed, and you
> installed them all just minutes before compiling, the locate database
> would not contain those recently added libraries (unless you were
> burning the midnight oil, and happened to install the dev packages
> just before the database got reindexed).
> 
> Now if someone combined fam (file alteration monitor) or something the
> Linux dnotify API with an incremental indexer, you might have a shot
> at noticing when new libraries are installed.

Even still, this is not what you want to rely on to check what libraries
are available since updatedb and locate will not index files on NFS
servers (thank god, that would never finish in a corporate
environment).

If all you are asking is for files on the local computer, why not
simply ask the package manager (rpm, apt etc) if that file is
installed ? One reason might be that the user has installed some local
libraries that he compiled himself, but in that case I would consider
that an advanced user that would also then be able to tell pkg-config
and configure how to find these libraries...

-- 
Daniel Nilsson