Software installation opinions needed

[Bruce Barnett]

In article <EMERY.90Sep19131715 at aries.linus.mitre.org> emery at linus.mitre.org (David Emery) writes:

	I get VERY UPSET by 3rd party installations that must be done as
   'root'. 

Here Here! Considering that I often attempt to install software on a
NFS server of one architecture, and the tape drive is on another
machine of another arcitecture, I would also like software developers
to consider the following:

	The installer is not root
	The file system is not local, but NFS mounted (i.e. being root
		wouldn't help.
	The tape drive is not on the local system.
	The system doing the installation might be diskless.

	/usr is mounted read only

	The location of the software might move after the
installation is complete.

	Large architecture independent data files should not be
duplicated if different machine types are supported.

For instance, we have a large common file server (actually we have two -
one is a clone). We install software in either

	/common/`arch`
or
	/common/all

The `arch` directory is for machine dependent files. The /common/all
is for all systems, or software that supports multiple architectures.
(i.e. /common/all/frame/bin/sun3 /common/all/frame/bin/sun4, etc.)

The emacs lisp files are in /common/all/emacs/lisp

We also have /usr/local - for server and clients. Some machines have
/local - for machines with local disks.

It is handy to be able to create one link ( either a symbolic link, or
a mount directory, and replace one package with another i.e. a more
recent version.

Bottom line - assume nothing is standard in any system.
--
Bruce G. Barnett	barnett at crd.ge.com	uunet!crdgw1!barnett