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Suppose I want to:

  • compile and install my own custom application
  • which requires downloading, compiling and installing the source for newest version of libthrift
  • which requires downloading, compiling and installing the latest version of libboost

Here, I'm installing these libraries in my system which may interact with other packages -- very many libraries depend on libthrift and libboost.

  • installing these may break existing package installed with apt-get/yum

Also, if I later run apt-get or yum:

  • my custom libthrift and libboost will be overwritten breaking my custom application that depends on custom versions of these libraries.

So, what's the solution here? I don't want to install into /home (I'd like the packages to be available to shared users in a code regression build cluster). I've also read that /opt is not really for this purpose (the packages installed should be self-contained, which they are not). The references I've found seem to cover this case in enough detail.

Community
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user48956
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1 Answers1

5

Generally, the solution is "don't try to install from source into directories managed by your packaging system".

You can install your custom-compiled code into /usr/local, for example, and having anything that depends on it look to /usr/local for libraries and include files using appropriate invocations of your build system (e.g., setting CPPFLAGS/CFLAGS/LDFLAGS for a typical Makefile).

You could even install everything into an application-specific directory (e.g., /usr/local/myapp, or /opt/myapp).

This is also a great use case for something like Docker, which makes it very easy to set up isolated development/runtime environments that are isolated from your host.

larsks
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