Install multiple versions of a package

Question

I want to install multiple versions of a package (say libX) from src. The package (libX) uses Autotools to build, so follows the ./configure , make, make install convention. The one installed by default goes to /usr/local/bin and /usr/local/lib and I want to install another version of this in /home/user/libX .

The other problem is that libX is a dependency for another package (say libY) which also uses autotools. How to I make libY point to the version installed in /home/user/libX ? There could be also a possibility that its a system package like ffmpeg and I want to use the latest svn version for my src code and hence build it from src. What do i do in that case ? What is the best practice in this case so that I do not break the system libraries?

I'm using Ubuntu 10.04 and Opensuse 10.3.

Answer 1

You can usually pass the --prefix option to configure to tell it to install the library in a different place. So for a personal version, you can usually run it as:

./configure --prefix=$HOME/usr/libX

and it will install in $HOME/usr/libX/bin, $HOME/usr/libX/lib, $HOME/usr/libX/etc and so on.

If you are building libY from source, the configure script usually uses the pkg-config tool to find out where a package is stored. libX should have included a .pc file in the directory $HOME/usr/libX/lib/pkgconfig which tells configure where to look for headers and library files. You will need to tell the pkg-config tool to look in your directory first.

This is done by setting the PKG_CONFIG_PATH to include your directory first. When configuring libY, try

PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$HOME/usr/libX/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig ./configure

man pkg-config should give details.