[Coco] OVCC - attn Walter Zambotti?

[Tormod Volden]

> On 2020-04-25 07:48, Andrew wrote:
> > But the only actual installs I will trust not to make a mess of my
> > system (and be easily able to be completely removed with the state
> > restored to things it changed during install) have to come from some
> > kind of debian-style repository.

You might want to look at my PPA where I upload OVCC snapshots:
https://launchpad.net/~tormodvolden/+archive/ubuntu/ovcc

These Agar libag-* packages would indeed replace any normal Agar
packages, and possibly break other software using Agar, but at least
they are easy to uninstall or replace.

(And BTW just in case some people look at the PPA and wonder: Yes, you
can in most cases install packages built for e.g. Bionic on a newer
system like 20.04. Up until some years ago, it was actually common
that a release contained packages that hadn't been rebuilt since
previous releases, until they would break.)

> >
> > So - my first question would be: Can this be done with OVCC? Do I have
> > to do a "make install" for anything? Can the patched GUI library
> > remain "out of the loop" as far as the system and compilation goes for
> > OVCC? So that - should I install a "new version" from a repo (or the
> > distro, if it has it) it will work for that stuff, as if the custom
> > version never existed...
> >
> > My second question would be - in lieu of the above, how well does OVCC
> > work via other "methods"? What I'm thinking of would be (potentially)
> > as installed under a containerized version of Linux, or on a
> > virtualbox image; does performance suffer much?
> >

You are raising a good point, and on Linux you can "containerize"
simply using LD_LIBRARY_PATH. It should be rather simple to change
above patched Agar library packages to install a special location
where normal programs won't see them, and either use LD_LIBRARY_PATH
or compile the ovcc binary to search in this special location. The
library packages also would need renaming so that the stock Agar
packages can be installed in parallel.


On Sat, Apr 25, 2020 at 4:33 AM Walter Zambotti wrote:
> The AGAR library needs to be placed in a location where it can be
> located.  Part of building the AGAR library does this for you with a
> (sudo make install, of course).  If you don't want to install the
> library then you can try placing the it in the same folder where you
> have ovcc.
>> Walter

When running configure the --prefix or --libdir options can be used so
that "make install" copies the library files somewhere else. Anyway,
we are talking about 4 library files (libag-*.so) so manual copying is
overseeable.

On the other hand, all or some of your changes would belong in the
upstream Agar, so any effort towards getting them upstream would be
laudable and maybe one day we don't need a custom version.

Walter, BTW, have you made any changes to your Agar since 2019-01-17?

Regards,
Tormod