Re: [gentoo-dev] Multiple kdelibs

[Dan Armak]

On Monday 22 October 2001 22:40, you wrote:
> Hmm .. if this is possible, putting all libs in /usr/lib should be too.
Let's put it this way: AFAIK it's possible and probably, just as it worked 
with qt. I haven't tested it yet (will in the next 2 days), but am confident 
it'll work. The libs cannot be placed in one dir because they have the same 
names, but ld knows how to select the right one at run time, or rather the 
first one that works.

> Hmm, this means that no KDE-apps will have there binaries in /usr/bin,
> or?
There'll be no kde-base/* binaries in /usr (kdebase, kdenetwork, whatever). I 
expect that all other KDE apps will still live in /usr, since there's little 
need for multiple versions of them. I think that's best.

Of course, there's nothing to say that one of the kdes installed shouldn't 
live in /usr and the others in /opt/kde$V, but it'd be difficult to selecvt 
via ebuilds where to install in that case. Another disadvantage of /usr is 
that it tends to get into paths and mix things up, whereas /opt/* isn't in 
any path unless I put it there.

> Hmm.. this will cause lots of troubles for developers (KDE/QT-developers
> that is) that has to make special cases for compiling things on Gentoo.
I understand that you mean people compiling manually, without using ebuilds - 
see below.

> As said above this is good for packages in portage but sucks pretty
> badly when you want to compile something manually.
>
> Perhaps we can solve this by making symlink from /usr/include/kde ->
> /usr/include/kde-$V (not sure of how kde installs its headers).
> This does however mean that all kde-$V ebuilds has to make this symlink
> and the one that is emerged last will be the one that is used (and if
> you unmerge it no link will be there which isn't a good scheme).
No, it's much simpler - just export the right KDEDIR env var and the kde 
app's configure script will use $KDEDIR/include before anything in any path.

>
> But as said, if it is possible to add them all to LDPATH (and it finds
> the correct lib to link) it should be possible to install them all in
> /usr/lib (ie. they have different version-numbers)?
No, see above.

> How do other distros solve this?
AFAIK no distro has a working multi-qt/kde scheme that allows free use of any 
combination of KDEs. We'll be the first :-)
Of course, this may be wrong, as I have little expirience with other distros, 
and in the three or four I've tried I didn't look at this too much because it 
was pre-kde3 time.

-- 

Dan Armak
Gentoo Linux Developer, Desktop Team
Matan, Israel