[ On Saturday, April 6, 2002 at 18:25:55 (+0200), Wojciech Puchar wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: X11 packages outside /usr/X11R6
>
> but being able to have only base X11R6 in /usr/X11R6 makes upgrading X
> MUCH easier

Well, not really, at least not unless you start your upgrade with wiping
out everything (eg. "rm -rf /usr/X11R6").  But you probably don't want
to do that unless you plan to re-build all your packages too, in which
case having all the ones that use X11 libraries installed /usr/X11R6
might actually make the upgrade easier than not having them there! ;-)
(if an X11 shared library binary interface used by some package were to
change in the new release then you can't remove the old libraries....)

Until "system packages" are in vogue there's no way to properly and
safely delete old files that are no longer present in a new release of
the base software (outside of whatever incomplete hacks are present in
sysinst, if you were to use sysinst), regardless of whether they're
mixed in with 3rd-party package files or not (last-modified timestamps
work for most binaries, but not so well for data files, docs, and
scripts, etc., i.e. things not modified by the build process).

So currently it makes no major difference if you've got other stuff
installed in /usr/X11R6 or not -- just untar the new base release
archives and away you go!  Only if some package has a filename clash
with a base file will there be any problem.

(either way upgrading X11 is made easier if all local config files for
X11 related things are copied to /etc/X11 and edited there and used from
there, though of course there's still the issue of keeping a copy of the
original unedited copy from the old release so you can do a three-way
merge of changes between releases into your localised configs, and
that's not done by default, though eventually it could be facilitated
using the RCS option for /var/backups)

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;  <gwoods@acm.org>;  <g.a.woods@ieee.org>;  <woods@robohack.ca>
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