Re: What should I do about /opt/freeware ?

David Kirkby schrieb:

On AIX 5.3 at least, IBM did not include bash. So I had to install
bash from some web site. But that put it in the same directory (/opt/
freeware) as what IBM do. for some programs (gzip etc). That seems a
bad idea IMHO. If the system gets screwed up, and I need to reinstall
AIX, it will overwrite anything I've put in /opt/freeware with its own
code. So I have to reinstall any programs which installed themselves
in /opt/freeware.

I guess you installed "bash" by using a binary package.
The biggest advantages of using packaged software are
- you can reinstall the packages
- you can deinstall the packages

Nothing under /opt/freeware (excluding the rpm itself) is part of AIX.
The rpm itself was updated by applying a ML or TL from IBM.
But: You can deinstall/reinstall the rpm if all RPM packages are deinstalled. If you don't like /opt/freeware, you can build your tools using another --prefix configure flag ;-)

But if your software expects predepencies in weird locations instead of the common ones, you will spend a lot of time with supporting your users.

For example:
I needed to build Python to build Mecurial. Mecurial needs a feature in Python which needs Python build against a shared lib of bzip2.
More or less funny things happy when the archive members naming within libbz2.a is slightly different. That's why such stuff resides at common places with common naming conventions. And it was IBM (and Bull) who initially created the packages for /opt/freeware and set the conventions.
There is no problem when others replace/update those packages with drop-in replacements.

that's what I did for the needed GTK2 (and dependencies) updates and that's is what Michael Perzl also always tries. And when I reported a runtime incompatibility at IBM an updated and fixed RPM was released within a week.
So try to use from /opt/freeware what is available first, if you need something updated/newer an updated but compatible package should considered.

You won't see the problems when compiling/porting on your machine. The problem will show up when you try to run the build on a different machine. (Huh... where is GCC's libstdc++... for e.g???)

So /opt/freeware isn't part of AIX but is *the* location for stuff shared amongst different programs that is not under "/usr".
Nothing bad about this, when only packaged software is installed there.

--
ULi
.

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