Re: keeping distros and admins off of each other's toes

On Tue, Feb 10, 2004 at 02:20:08PM -0500, Paul Jarc wrote:
> Stefan Karrmann <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Suppose the local admin provides /package/prog/skalibs-0.40 as default.
> > But I want to use the new /package/prog/skalibs-0.41. How can I get
> > this?
> 
> You can set up your own private $HOME/package hierarchy, and any
> packages installed there can be customized to use
> $HOME/package/prog/skalibs instead of /package/prog/skalibs.

Another possibility would be to use a overlaying file system. On Linux
that could be translucency
<URL:http://sourceforge.net/projects/translucency/> and on *BSD there is
a union file system IIRC.

Using that you could mirror the whole /package tree in $HOME/package, do
the modification you'd like to have done and configure the packages to
always use $HOME/package.

But doing that way would also need the help of root since it involves
using kernel modules or file system mounts.

Regards,
 Thomas