installing software using depot

Installing software on facilitized SCS machines

1. Using source: this is the way I usually try to do it.
   1. Create a local "install" directory that is writeable by you. On my machine, I install stuff in /usr0/users/install/<application>
   
   
   2. Go to the directory where you have downloaded the source. Run configure with the --prefix option, e.g. configure --prefix=/usr0/users/mahim/install/<application> Some applications do not have an appropriate configure script; you can probably get the same effect by modifying the Makefile.
   
   
   3. As yourself (not root), follow the remaining compilation and installation steps (usually make followed by make install)
   
   
   4. as root, add the following line to /usr/local/depot/depot.pref.local:

      path <application>    /usr0/users/install/<application>

   5. as root, run dosupdepot
   
   
   This should have created all the appropriate symlinks in /usr/local/{bin,man,opt,share...}. Test by running your newly installed program.

2. Using RPMs: not advisable. Most of the useful software installed on these machines is not through RPMs, so the package database is incomplete. Installing a new RPM turns up lots of false dependency information which is very difficult to resolve. Also, if you accidently over-write a critical library, lots of things can break.

   If you do install an RPM, check if it is relocatable. If it is, install into a non-system directory (using the --prefix or --relocate options) and use depot to create appropriate symlinks (as above).

Other Depot tricks

1. To install a particular version of some collection (e.g., 2.95.3 for gcc):

   collection.release 2.95.3 egcs

2. To install some software locally instead of making symlinks as depot does by default (recommended if you don't want to be hurt by AFS outages):

   collection.installmethod copy egcs