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Re: gEDA-user: gEDA DLL hell

Karel Kulhavy wrote: 
On Fri, Oct 28, 2005 at 01:44:16PM +0200, Henrik Karlsson wrote:

Karel Kulhavy skrev:

But what should user do when he has an old version of gEDA and needs
a new one? Erase the disk and reinstall the operating system completely?


How about 'yum update' or 'apt-get update; apt-get upgrade'? Or use some
other package mangement system.



clock@kestrel:~$ yum update
bash: yum: command not found
clock@kestrel:~$ apt-get update
bash: apt-get: command not found
clock@kestrel:~$ apt-get upgrade
bash: apt-get: command not found

Friend has Ubuntu and there are no gEDA packages.

These suggestions are irrelevant. The message is: reinstallation
procedure doesn't exist and has to be written. Please understand
the message and fix the problem.


well, just do 'make uninstall' in your source tree. That should be supported by all software which uses automake.

seriously though, what you're asking for goes way beyond just geda and it is silly to thing that geda will solve this problem which exists for essentially all unix software. The right solution will vary drastically based on the particular environment. Is this a single user, all software installed locally system, a distributed system where mirroring of software across a WAN is needed, maybe just a small workgroup that shares installed software on a LAN. Are you trying to stay within some particular software packaging and deployment system? Whats your system policy on paths, does everything use --prefix=/usr/local or do you do --prefix=/opt/package-version and create a link farm in /opt/bin or maybe just add directories to your path, do you need to support having multiple versions installed at the same time? If so, how do you want users to pick the version? Change of path? Versioned wrapper scripts?

The point is there are many many approaches to this problem, each with its advantages and disadvantages. No one approach is likely to fit everyones needs. By using automake and autoconf, geda automatically provides the sort of functionality though in its build system to help it integrated into many of these different packaging systems.

Speaking as one who maintains the geda packages for NetBSD's packaging system and as one who has installed multiple versions outside of a formal packaging system, its just not that hard _unless_ you make some bad sysadmin decisions up front.

If you don't want to use a formal packaging system, I suggest you just use --prefix=/opt/geda-${version} and put everything into its own directory. Then you can easily have multiple versions and just pick the right one for your path.

I'll note, that the links download page a) does not have correct install instructions for many systems (there is no single package system, ldconfig is not universal, etc) and b) has no indication whatsoever of how to deinstall or install multiple versions. I'm not trying to pick on links here, but rather to say that I'm not sure I've seen a program which comes with the instructions you seem to be asking for.

Or maybe I've missed the point of your question...

-Dan