Re: [gnu.org #742057] Make standard targets

[Karl Berry]

Hi Dave,

    Position independence is generally a good idea.

I don't disagree in principle, having expended zillions of hours making
TeX Live be that way.  However, as pointed out, a requirement that all
programs following GNU coding standards become "position independent" at
runtime is a radical change.  If you want to make the argument for it to
rms, feel free.  He's the only one who could make that kind of decision.

Meanwhile, it's certainly true that configure && make is not a package
management system (installing test versions, etc.), but it was never
intended to be.  So that argument is unlikely to fly.

FWIW, for myself, for packages like Apache where I want to control the
version I'm using, I build it with something like
  configure --prefix=/opt/apache-2.2.21
and have a symlink /opt/apache which points to the version-specific
installed tree.  Then it's trivial to change the symlink back and forth.
Works for me.

Of course, for more complicated methods, there is also stow and all the
other multitudes of package management software out there, most of which
I have no knowledge of.

Happy installing,
karl