[Gambas-user] Having multiple revisions of Gambas installed simultaneously

[Tobias Boege]

On Sat, 02 Mar 2013, Beno?t Minisini wrote:
> Le 01/03/2013 15:18, Tobias Boege a ?crit :
> > Hi,
> >
> > we would like to have at least the stable version and trunk of Gambas
> > installed on the same machine. It's no problem to ./configure --prefix=$DIR
> > but I worry about the components... I looked around a bit in the sources and
> > it seemed to me that all components are eventually loaded from under /usr
> > (because of GAMBAS_LINK_PATH) which means that the components are from
> > another version.
> >
> > Did I miss something? How could it be accomplished to have two revisions of
> > Gambas right runnable one the same machine?
> >
> > Regards,
> > Tobi
> >
> 
> You can't easily have different major version of Gambas running on the 
> same system.
> 
> To find the Gambas installation directory, Gambas does something weird: 
> it looks at the path defined at compilation time, but if '/usr/bin/gbx3' 
> exists, it takes precedence. And if that '/usr/bin/gbx3' is a symbolic 
> link, that symbolic is followed.
> 
> Then "/usr/bin/env" is used for finding the interpreter inside Gambas 
> executable shebang.
> 
> So if you install two different Gambas in two different prefixs that are 
> *not* /usr, then you can switch between both by changing the 
> '/usr/bin/gbx3' symbolic link. But you can't have both running at the 
> same time!
> 

No, running both at the same time is not necessary.

For the adventurous people, changing a /usr/bin/gbx3 symlink to switch
between versions is an acceptable approach, I guess.

Thanks,
Tobi