[libvirt] [Libguestfs] compile libguestfs 1.19.35

[Richard W.M. Jones]

[The context for libvirt users is how to let people do
'make install' without having conflicts with installed copies
of packages.]

On Wed, Sep 05, 2012 at 07:39:37AM -0400, Whit Blauvelt wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 05, 2012 at 08:07:09AM +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> 
> > It is possible to run 'make install', but we normally do not recommend
> > you do that.  To avoid conflicts between other packages, you should
> > build a libguestfs package for your Linux distro, which is not so
> > easy.
> 
> Is there a goal at least that if a the group of programs including libvirt
> and qemu-kvm is built and installed from tar, that it should install with
> internal consistency regardless of underlying distro?
> 
> All the distros necessarily lag development here. Sometimes new features are
> key to a particular deployment. Isn't it a useful goal to produce components
> such that, if "make install" is used with each of them, the result should be
> good? Is that the goal of these related projects?
> 
> Now days, for instance, every distro does a good LAMP stack. But earlier in
> the development of that stack it was often best to compile it from source,
> due to versions lagging and distro maintainers making assumptions that
> weren't well honed. In the first few years of any new stack, shouldn't we
> expect that many sysadmins will be in the same position?
> 
> It's best if there's some defined subset of programs whose "make install"
> options, by default, will produce a coherent stack. 

I'm not sure how special libvirt & qemu are.  You could try installing
to a local prefix (I sometimes use "./configure --prefix=$HOME/gnu").

Then you have to sort out the environment variables that need setting.

I don't think libvirt or libguestfs or qemu document what environment
variables should be set to run an internally consistent local copy
of the entire libvirt/KVM stack from your home directory.
libguestfs has the "./run" script which can be modified.

Anyone got any thoughts?  I think it is a genuine concern.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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