Ubuntu is not a good distribution for Multimedia

[Robert Parker]

On Wednesday 08 December 2004 00:18, Ben Edwards wrote:
>
> I have been compiling sources but was hoping to do newbie howtos for
> multimedia.  The problem with compiling from source 9I belive) is that
> apt douse not know about stuff you have added and doing a 'apt-get
> update' can write over some of your built from source stuff or give
> you two versions of things.

Actually, there should be no conflict if everything is FHS compliant.
The users $PATH should look something like this:
/usr/local/bin:/opt/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/bin/X11:/usr/games

Third party software compiled locally should go into:
/opt/<makers_name>/bin which means that the user who builds it has to do is 
put a symlink to the newly compiled binary within /opt/bin. You could argue 
that make install should make the symlink but I'm yet to see it.

At worst, the binary will be placed in /usr/local/bin (a lot of GNU stuff 
does that). Not quite compliant but still fairly harmless.

Package managers install within /usr/bin and so will neither run instead of 
anything you compile, nor will upgrades via the package system stomp over 
what you have compiled.

Of course stuff like config files is another tin of worms, but my belief is 
that good package managers like the Debian project leave existing configs 
alone or at worst make a backup copy of original.

I'd love to see your howtos for compiling any multi-media apps. I think that 
these docs could, maybe should, include some commentary about where the 
binary gets installed as above. If it gets installed somewhere non FHS 
compliant perhaps advocate the use of the --prefix option to ./configure to 
bring it into compliance.


Regards
Bob