autoconf 2.62

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Tue, 2008-07-08 at 17:12 +1000, Chris Johns wrote:
> 
> Chris Johns wrote:
> > Till Straumann wrote:
> >> I say this having no personal interest since I
> >> always build my toolchains myself (the RPM install location
> >> doesnt' fit our filesystem layout here anyways).

> What is specific about your set up that causes this ?

Generally speaking, with my "Fedora Packaging Committee" member hat on,
there normally are 2 reasons for such kind of issues:

a) The user doesn't have "root" privileges on a particular system.
This prevents him from being able to install _any_ package, comprising
vendor supplied add-on packages, like ours.

In this case, the user will have to find ways to install into a
local/user-writable directory (often $HOME, or $HOME/<package>).
Prepackaged binaries/rpms won't hardly be helpful to this groop of users
at all.


b) A site applying some non-standardized filesystem layout or
conventions they inherited from the past. In many cases, such kind of
filesystem layouts predate and/or clash with the FHS.

In these cases, a change in site-conventions would be required, which
makes such cases a primarily management and a political issue. Often
users are not in a position to do anything about such cases, esp. when
facing sys-admins, who are in opposition to the FHS.


In some cases a) and b) apply at the same time. These situations can be
found in networks granting a user or a group of users write-permissions
to an arbitrary, non-standardized directory, somewhere.


Occasionally, a 3rd kind of issues can be found:

c) Sites admins not allowing installation of any "non-certified"
packages. This kind of issues isn't untypical on sites using
"high-priced/commercial" Linux distros, which occasionally are bound to
some kind of contract restrictions (support/maintenance contracts,
guarantees/liabilities).

Here, IMO, the user should reconsider his choice of platform/OS.



And finally, there is another kind of issues, often found on "private"
systems:

People, who expect packages/rpms always to install to /usr.
These people miss that this would mean to mix add-on packages with
OS-vendor supplied ones, which would easily provoke hardly controllable
clashes/conflicts between OS-vendor packages and add-on packages.
To avoid such clashes/conflicts, the FHS reserves /usr for OS-vendor
supplied packages and mandates /opt/ for add-on packages.


Ralf