What's a "good" way to handle installation of conflicting ports?

James oscartheduck at gmail.com
Sun Feb 17 21:07:47 UTC 2008


On Sun, 2008-02-17 at 11:52 -0800, David Wolfskill wrote:
> I've been asked to come up with at least an interim approach --
> that can be implemented within a few days -- to allow the SAs at
> my new job to install conflicting ports on the same machine.
> 
> I can think of some approaches, but I'd prefer to use one that doesn't
> suck too much, and that doesn't impede the transition to something better.
> I would also like to continue to be able to make use of the FreeBSD
> "ports" system, and be able to take advantage of the ports collection,
> such as dependency-tracking.
> 
> Their (the SAs) stated preferred approach is to use GNU stow
> (sysutils/stow), though I've not used it previously, and I'm not
> quite clear on just how that would work in practice -- and still provide
> the benefits of the FreeBSD "ports" system as mentioned above.  (They
> use it for the Linux machines; not sure about the Solaris machines.)
> 
> The catalyst for the exercise is that we have some pools of machines
> for developers to use; some of the developers wish to use
> editors/xemacs; some wish to use editors/emacs -- on the same machine.
> (Given the requirement, it's OK for the affected folks to need to adjust
> search, library, and man paths.)
> 
You can either edit the Makefile of the port to try and install it
somewhere non-standard and hope there are no conflicting libraries, or
you could implement a jail system.

If you had a beefy enough machine, give each developer their own jail
and let them run with it.

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/jails.html


> (I haven't been in the new position long enough to know why folks can't
> just each use their own desktop/workstations, configured however each
> one sees fit.  Even so, I suppose that there might be a developer out
> there who might want conflicting ports on his dektop -- I've had that
> request before ... or rather, a request that implied that:  One of the
> developers at a previous place of employment was distressed when he
> determined that he was unable to install every port in the ports
> collection on his desktop machine.  In that case, his local disk storage
> gave out before he ran into the "conflicts" issue, but I'm sure that
> would have come up eventually.)
> 
> (I've subscribed to -ports@, at least for now, so there's no need to
> copy me on messages sent to the list.)
> 
> Anyway, thanks in advance for suggestions -- even pointing out why a
> certain approach would be inadvisable would be helpful.
> 
> Peace,
> david



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