[The context for libvirt users is how to let people do 'make install' without having conflicts with installed copies of packages.] On Wed, Sep 05, 2012 at 07:39:37AM -0400, Whit Blauvelt wrote: > On Wed, Sep 05, 2012 at 08:07:09AM +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote: > > > It is possible to run 'make install', but we normally do not recommend > > you do that. To avoid conflicts between other packages, you should > > build a libguestfs package for your Linux distro, which is not so > > easy. > > Is there a goal at least that if a the group of programs including libvirt > and qemu-kvm is built and installed from tar, that it should install with > internal consistency regardless of underlying distro? > > All the distros necessarily lag development here. Sometimes new features are > key to a particular deployment. Isn't it a useful goal to produce components > such that, if "make install" is used with each of them, the result should be > good? Is that the goal of these related projects? > > Now days, for instance, every distro does a good LAMP stack. But earlier in > the development of that stack it was often best to compile it from source, > due to versions lagging and distro maintainers making assumptions that > weren't well honed. In the first few years of any new stack, shouldn't we > expect that many sysadmins will be in the same position? > > It's best if there's some defined subset of programs whose "make install" > options, by default, will produce a coherent stack. I'm not sure how special libvirt & qemu are. You could try installing to a local prefix (I sometimes use "./configure --prefix=$HOME/gnu"). Then you have to sort out the environment variables that need setting. I don't think libvirt or libguestfs or qemu document what environment variables should be set to run an internally consistent local copy of the entire libvirt/KVM stack from your home directory. libguestfs has the "./run" script which can be modified. Anyone got any thoughts? I think it is a genuine concern.