A (probably stupid) question about dependencies

[Steven Monai]

Daniele:

My experience with Linux (Slackware mostly, not Red Hat) has been that you
can USUALLY just build the new version of a package and install it on top
of the old version. (Notice the emphasis on USUALLY, which means NOT
ALWAYS!) In your case, the packages you describe are all mature support
libraries, and so I don't think you'll have any problems. There can
sometimes be old files left lying around from an older version, but they
almost never affect the proper functioning of the new version.

Having said that, since you're running Red Hat, you should probably look
into obtaining RPMs for the packages you want to upgrade. The nice thing
about using pre-built packages versus "./configure && make && make install"
is that it's easy to remove an RPM package if you suspect that it's causing
a problem. And it's easy to find out exactly what files an RPM has
installed; building and installing stuff from source has the disadvantage
that it can be difficult to determine what files "make install" has
actually installed, and where they are installed.

I always rebuild MapServer whenever one of the packages it depends on is
upgraded. In theory, it shouldn't be necessary to rebuild MS if all of the
upgraded packages are dynamically linked libraries, but I can't be bothered
to look into which are dynamically linked and which are statically linked.
So I just rerun my MS build script, and I know it's ready to go.

Regards,
-SM
--


On Tue, 14 Jun 2005 07:55:41 +0200, Daniele Margotti
<margottid at COMUNE.LUGO.RA.IT> wrote:

>Hi list,
>I have installed Mapserver several months ago.
>Now, I want to update (configure, make & make install) some packages,
>because there are new versions of them: GD, gdal, geo-shapelib, libjpeg,
>libtiff, proj.4, and so on.
>
>Do I have to "uninstall" the previous version of these libraries, or
>installation automatically "covers" the old version?
>And, most important, do I have to recompile Mapserver or does it
>automatically use the new version of these libraries?
>
>I have a Linux Red Hat 9.0.
>
>Thank you,
>    Daniele
>
>