It turned out that the second install was not the cause of the timestamp change in the original. On reviewing "history" it turned out that I had accidentally run the link generation twice. That turned up this (for me) unexpected behavior: mkdir /tmp/foo ls -al /tmp/foo total 16 drwxrwxr-x. 2 modules modules 6 Jun 24 16:49 . drwxrwxrwt. 173 root root 12288 Jun 24 16:49 .. ln -s /tmp/foo /tmp/bar ls -al /tmp/foo drwxrwxr-x. 2 modules modules 6 Jun 24 16:49 . drwxrwxrwt. 173 root root 12288 Jun 24 16:49 .. ln -s /tmp/foo /tmp/bar ls -al /tmp/foo total 16 drwxrwxr-x. 2 modules modules 17 Jun 24 16:51 . drwxrwxrwt. 173 root root 12288 Jun 24 16:50 .. lrwxrwxrwx. 1 modules modules 8 Jun 24 16:51 foo -> /tmp/foo The repeated soft link actually put a file under the target. Strange. Apparently it is expected behavior. The problem can be avoided by using this form: ln -sn $TARGET $LINK The later installs are much faster than the first one, since putting in the links is very fast and building the packages is not. This was the trivial case though, since having done one install all the prerequisites were just "there". The johnnydep package will list the dependencies without doing the install. Guess I will throw something together based on that and the above results and see how it goes. Regards, David Mathog On Wed, Jun 24, 2020 at 4:23 PM Filipe Laíns <filipe.lains@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, 2020-06-23 at 15:51 -0700, David Mathog wrote:
What I am after is some method of keeping exactly one copy of each package-version in the common area (ie, one might find foo-1.2, foo-1.7, and foo-2.3 there), while also presenting only the one version of each (let's say foo-1.7) to a particular installed program. On linux it might do that by making soft links to the common PYTHONPATH area from another directory for which it sets PYTHONPATH for the application. Finally, this has to be usable by any account which has read execute access to the main directory.
Does such a beast exist? If so, please point me to it!
I have been meaning to do something like this for a while now! But unfortunately I can't find the time.
If you do choose of start implementing it, please let me know. I would be happy to help out.
Cheers, Filipe Laíns