[tech] /usr/local on Motsugo

David Adam zanchey at ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au
Wed Sep 23 14:41:05 AWST 2015


Some of us ([*OX]?) have installed a whole bunch of stuff to /usr/local on 
Motsugo, including things that are older than what's available in Debian 
and binaries that don't work. The tree used to install at least some of 
these files (/root/buildFromSource) were deleted, which makes removing 
things cleanly difficult and also breaks some of the installed binaries:
 $ pcretest
pcretest: error while loading shared libraries: libpcre.so.1: cannot open 
shared object file: No such file or directory
 $ pcre-config --libs
-L/root/buildFromSource/julia/usr/lib -lpcre

I didn't really want to have blow the whole tree away, so I restored parts 
of /root/buildFromSource from the backups. I've removed the worst offenders 
with `make uninstall` where possible:
 * LLVM 3.3 (3.5 and 3.6 installed already on the system)
 * PCRE 8.31 (8.35 installed already on the system)
 * libunwind 1.1 (1.1 installed already on the system)
 * fftw 3.3 (3.4 installed already on the system)
 * mpfr 3.1.2 (3.1.2 installed already on the system)

I removed the following by hand:
 * git 2.0.1 (2.1.4 installed already on the system)
 * Subversion 1.8.8 (1.8.10 installed already on the system)
 * utf8proc 1.1.6
 * openblas 0.2.13 (0.2.13 installed on the system; 0.2.14 is in testing 
    if required)
 * openlibm

Although it's always tempting to install packages with `make install`, I 
really want to discourage anyone from doing that into shared locations at 
UCC. They are often hard to uninstall, so please either leave the source 
somewhere (e.g. /usr/src) or use dpkg. I am happy to help with building 
Debian packages (often not that hard) or backporting packages (usually 
quite easy). Failing that, please use a private prefix wherever possible.

David Adam
UCC Wheel Member
zanchey at ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au


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