Apparently, though unproven, at 10:55 on Thursday 23 September 2010, Helmut
Jarausch did opine thusly:

> Hi,
>
> when portage installs a package, it first installs it into some "shadow
> root". Then it records all files installed before it moves the files to
> the "real root".
>
> I have to do some installations on SUSE systems (which are not
> administered by me) and I'd like to imitate that procedure there.
>
> Can anybody tell me if it's not too complicated and if yes, how to
> achieve this (on a foreign system like SUSE).
>
> Many thanks for your help,
> Helmut.


1. Remove all traces of yast and it's bastard brethren from the SuSE box.
2. Have three qualified sysadmins double check that you have indeed removed
every last trace of it.
3. PREFIX=/some/stage/dir/
4. ./configure && make && make install
5. find /some/stage/dir/ > some_file
6. move everything in stage dir to real dir

Why remove yast?
Because it's a sneaky P.O.S. and goes to extraordinary lengths to nuke all
your hard work done without it.

And how you deal with file collisions is up to you. Yast really won't like you
if you overwrite some config file with your own testing version.


--
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com

On 09/23/10 11:50:19, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> Apparently, though unproven, at 10:55 on Thursday 23 September 2010,
> Helmut
> Jarausch did opine thusly:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > when portage installs a package, it first installs it into some
> "shadow
> > root". Then it records all files installed before it moves the
> files
> to
> > the "real root".
> >
> > I have to do some installations on SUSE systems (which are not
> > administered by me) and I'd like to imitate that procedure there.
> >
> > Can anybody tell me if it's not too complicated and if yes, how to
> > achieve this (on a foreign system like SUSE).
> >
> > Many thanks for your help,
> > Helmut.
>
>
> 1. Remove all traces of yast and it's bastard brethren from the SuSE
> box.
> 2. Have three qualified sysadmins double check that you have indeed
> removed
> every last trace of it.
> 3. PREFIX=/some/stage/dir/
> 4. ./configure && make && make install
> 5. find /some/stage/dir/ > some_file
> 6. move everything in stage dir to real dir
>
> Why remove yast?
> Because it's a sneaky P.O.S. and goes to extraordinary lengths to
> nuke
> all
> your hard work done without it.
>
> And how you deal with file collisions is up to you. Yast really won't
> like you
> if you overwrite some config file with your own testing version.

Thanks Alan!
Unfortunately, I don't understand how this can work.
Simplify using PREFIX failed for me since many packages record the
full path for configuration/data/help files etc. in the generated
binaries or libraries.
When moving such an application/library it will still search for
those files in the build directory.
I would image Portage uses some sort of chroot (then the pathes are
identical)

Furthermore, I cannot remove yast since I'm only a "guest" on such
boxes.
Normally I'd use a PREIFX=/usr/local/<MYAPP> but some application
still install something into /etc/ or similar and I'd like to catch
these cases.

Helmut.

> Thanks Alan!
> Unfortunately, I don't understand how this can work.
> Simplify using PREFIX failed for me since many packages record the
> full path for configuration/data/help files etc. in the generated
> binaries or libraries.
> When moving such an application/library it will still search for
> those files in the build directory.
> I would image Portage uses some sort of chroot (then the pathes are
> identical)

Impossible! Alan does not know how to compile? ;-) He's been up to early.

Have a look into the build.log and you find the answer:

make -j3 DESTDIR=/home/prefix/gentoo/var/tmp/portage/sys-apps/texinfo-4.13/image/
install

So it's not configure but make who takes the temporary install directory.

PREFIX is indeed the final target.

Al

* Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com> wrote:
> 1. Remove all traces of yast and it's bastard brethren from the SuSE box.
> 2. Have three qualified sysadmins double check that you have indeed removed
> every last trace of it.
> 3. PREFIX=/some/stage/dir/
> 4. ./configure && make && make install

No, configure with normal FHS prefixes (eg. --prefix=/usr
--sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var ...) and pass the
DESTDIR variable on 'make install'.

Ah, BTW: first you'll should install a recent and clean toolchain
completely. SuSE's toolchain packages are known to be broken.

> Why remove yast?
> Because it's a sneaky P.O.S. and goes to extraordinary lengths to nuke all
> your hard work done without it.

ACK. That's the first thing I do when some customer comes around with
some SuSE box (especially those strange masshoster installations).

SuSE is meant for people who wear suits and ties even when going to bed.
It's probably nice for migrating Windoze people into the *nix world,
but not for enterprise production systems ;-o

The funny thing is, back in the 90's it had been a really good
distro, back when people like Werner Fink and Boris Nalbach were
in charge of the technical designs. That's long gone - 6.x already
showed big signs of degregation, 7.x was ugly, beginning with 8.x
totally unusable ;-p

Take my advise: migrate to another distro.


cu
--
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