Klaus Steinberger wrote:
> Hi,
> 
>> We have asked may times for volunteers to help us put all of those
>> scientific applications into SL.  The only thing we ever get is "please
>> put in so.and.so".  We do not get "Yes, I will help you put in these
>> scientific applications".
> 
> We talked about making a contrib RPM for root, but my colleague who maintains 
> the root installations at our site is somewhat reluctant to pack root into a 
> rpm. He says root is too much of a moving target to have it burn into a rpm.
> 
> Usually we have 3 installations of root on our systems in parallel (old, new, 
> prod) to maintain binary compatibility. This would be hard to do with RPM's.


Red Hat did something similar with python 1.5 and python 2.

I don't know what root is or what releases exist, so interpret this to 
suit reality.

root's binaries go to
/usr/bin/root-<releaseno> - maybe /usr/bin/root-1.0, /usr/bin/root-1.5, 
/usr/bin/root-2.0, Similar for man pages.

root's shared libraries also have the version in their filenames.

root's library-type scripts go to /usr/lib/root-<releaseno>. See perl 
for examples.

root's docs go to /usr/share/doc/root-<releaseno>

Use Red Hat's alternatives system to maintain symlinks in /usr/bin that 
point to the default root _on this system_. See /etc/alternatives/ for 
other packages that use alternatives.

Uses can explicitly choose the version they want, maybe executing root-1.5

Alternatives is a standard way, but one could also use a script in 
/etc/root to set users' environment for their prefered version; users 
would source the one of choice. A symlink, /etc/profile.d/root.sh, would 
point to the default version (but might need to be source explicitly in 
some cases, think crontabs.)



> What we do: root sits on a shared (NFS) storage, so we don't have to install 
> it on every desktop, they just use the shared storage.
> 
> Of course it would be easier with a rpm to maintain all those notebooks ....
> 
> Sincerly,
> Klaus
> 


-- 

Cheers
John

-- spambait
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