On Sat, Nov 23, 2013 at 04:08:39PM +0100, Thomas Trepl wrote: > > **Q** > Long text, short question: > How can I distinct pre-install, build-time- and post-install commands using > the books instructions? I feel I can't as I can't see any different roles or > such. > Or is there something I missed? If no, are there plans to introduce > something > to the book and - more general - is there interest in doing that at all? > After some time thinking about this, I think that adding instructions is likely to conflict with "let the user decide which dependencies to include" and will certainly make the book harder to edit.
At the moment, we sometimes have optional configure switches for added (or even, perhaps, for omitted) dependencies, together with alternative install instructions for documentation if weird and wonderful dependencies have been provided. In some other cases we note optional deps but do not list switches required to actually use them - all these things can be found by reviewing the output from 'configure', and perhaps the linkages found with 'ldd'. And critically we expect people to read the whole page - I've been pulled up on that myself, several times. In my own case, everything I regularly build has a script. For some of them, my normal build matches the book. But for many it is different. Yes, setting up scripts for each package is tedious (and so is revising everything to work differently). But for perhaps 95% of everything I build I can start with a simple template to which I add the package/version, any patch(es), and sometimes one or two additional commands. Once the script is working, it goes into my local git tree and then gets updated as necessary. Of course, that does mean that later changes in the book's instructions only get incorporated into my scripts when/if I notice them. Summary - I don't think you'll get away from manual modifications to the instruction for many packages. Of course, DESTDIR brings its own can of worms in some packages [ those which don't support it, those (typically qt-using) which need a variation such as INSTALL_ROOT (unsure of spelling without checking, that variant might be for glibc), those which support it but only for root ] plus, of course, the occasional need to run some commands after installing - typically ldconfig, but several others have been noted in the book and I'm sure there are many more still to be discovered. ĸen -- das eine Mal als Tragödie, dieses Mal als Farce -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
