On Mon, Feb 07, 2011 at 05:34:56PM -0500, Casey Daniels wrote:
> I finally was able to finish my first LFS system and it was a fun time.
> Now I have some questions. I plan on building my second build that I
> actually plan on using but didn't understand much about Package
> Management or Upgrading. From the Short info in the Book it looks like
> the Symlink Method will work for what I want (since i actually will have
> two-three servers, four desktops, and a few single use Linux boxes) and
> i want to be able to compile once and then use on all the systems. From
> what I was ready GNU Stow looks like a good program to use. Here are my
> questions
>
> 1st Is it possible/a prudent Idea to use something like stow for all
> packages (with the exception of GCC, Binutils, Glibc, and the API
> Headers)? If other packages should be install directly which ones?
>
> 2nd is an upgrade question. I have my nice working LFS system and being
> the good administor find that one of my packages(example ncurses)
> releases a 5.1 where all I have is 5.0. a bunch of my other packages
> depend on this package can I just complie and install the one package or
> is there something I have to do for all the other packages that depend
> on it?
>
> Thank You,
> Casey
> --
I have no opinion on your preferred package management. In theory,
build once, run on multiple machines of the same architecture
*probably* works. Certainly, LFS does its best to build down to a
"lowest common denominator" (i486 when most people with 32-bit x86
can probably use i686). If it doesn't work, you get to keep all the
pieces.
For upgrading, *provided* no other package has linked to the static
library (which is why I keep blathering on about getting rid of
static libs), you can *usually* drop in a newer minor version (so,
5.1 can replace 5.0, but 6.0 will merit recompiling the packages
that use it). Many packages will correctly sort out the symlinks,
so that libfoo.so and libfoo.so.5 are both updated to point to the
new version (5.1 in the example). Other packages, sometimes in
occasional versions, may fail to do this so you really need to check
each time.
Also, sometimes a good upgrade breaks something else. In my own
case, for a while I had two versions of libxml2 installed because of
breakage in abiword - I forget the details, but basically it was a
question of fudging around with the symlinks - that sort of
workaround might not always be available.
Backups are always good. So is knowing *what* the upgrade
installs. Testing to check that applications find the newer library
('ldd'), and that they appear to work correctly, is essential.
Unfortunately, noticing problems often takes a long time.
ĸen
--
das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce
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