Re: debian

On Mon, 24 Apr 2006, in the Usenet newsgroup alt.linux, in article
<124oi8ckfu2af3c@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Jimchip wrote:
On 2006-04-24, Moe Trin <ibuprofin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Additionally, the author of an after-market package may fail to follow
the FHS requirements about staying the heck OUT of the system directories,
like /bin/ or /sbin/ et.al. (a very _common_ mistake).

That's the problem..."fail to follow the FHS...". My point was that Debian
is strict about it.

Yeah, but this thread started out with J.O. Aho answering a request for
an astrology package for Debian by directing the O/P to freshmeat.net.
Last I checked, Debian doesn't control freshmeat.net, any more than
sourceforge, or any other after-market source. I did a quick scan through
the Makefiles I have on my primary home workstation last night, and 71 of
the 109 defaulted to dropping their stuff into /bin/ or /usr/bin - even
though as near as I can tell the authors have absolutely no connection
with any distributor. While fairly rare, I have run into problems when
some author decided to name his creation with the same name as an existing
application. This then gets messy no matter where the author drops the
binary, especially if the after-market application does something
completely different from the identically named original.

It's a little the same with Debian in the sense that a source build will
catch any dependencies...libraries don't always match. Debian recommends
starting with source in /usr/local/src/whatever_program and then
/usr/local/bin/whatever_program, /usr/local/lib/, /usr/local/etc/ for the
typical files. Not really bad but, in my case anyway, I really need a good
reason to bother.

That would be both LSB and FHS compliant. Thing is, I generally build or
compile the software as a special user "builder", who has restricted
access to the system - and owns only the stuff in /usr/local/src/ and
below. I'll su to root only to install the finished product. This
procedure was started by a company auditor in the mid-90s, probably as
a result of Ken Thompson's "Reflections on Trusting Trust" paper to the
ACM. It really isn't all that inconvenient, and adds another layer of
security, as "builder" can't change anything on the system or any
user's account.

15,180 total packages is what the Debian FAQ claims (June, 2005) are in
"the distribution".

Wonder how that is interpreted.

When 'alien' came out in the mid-1990s, there weren't that many things to
worry about. For what it's worth, alien was supplied as part of several
rpm based distributions as well as Debian.

It's just not automatic but where there's a will... :)

I actually liked having 'alien' around. It was a very useful tool to be
able to convert "official" packages from other distributions into something
you could install. We didn't dare use it at work, but for quick and dirty
conversions, it was great. Now, I'll just grab the source package and look
to see how the package author "improved" the package for their distribution.

Still, it's not too bad if one knows what (or where) their particular distro
is going to be nice about 'foreign' packages. A lot of times,
compiling/installing into a home subdirectory followed by a /usr/bin/symlink
can be a good compromise. Keep a few notes and just rebuild (ugh, in your
case maybe 120) symlinks.

[compton ~]$ echo $PATH
/usr/local/bin:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/home/ibuprofin/bin
[compton ~]$

Not needed for me - the stuff in my ~/bin/ is for my use only. If others
are going to use stuff, it goes in /usr/local/bin. There are plenty of
links - virtually all are soft - that are mainly used for giving a common
filename. My monthly diary is a link to a file (actually, the command 'diary'
is an alias to '/bin/vi ~/diary' and ~/diary is the link to an actual file).

Old guy
.

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