[Radiance-general] Upgrading to R4: "There were some errors."

[Lars O. Grobe]

Cramer Silkworth wrote:
> Bernd, adding the build-dep packages didn't solve the compiling 
> problem. If the setting raypath doesn't fix it, I'm starting with a 
> fresh install of the OS with all packages selected. Radiance is the 
> only thing I use this machine for, so it's not really a big deal.
Hi Cramer,

installing the complete operating system is certainly not required. Did 
you (exactly) follow Bernd's instructions, not only adding the packages? 
What the procedure he described does is actually building Radiance on 
your system, but not by simply copying the binaries to /usr/local, but 
by integrating them into your system using the package manager whenever 
it is possible. Just follow his steps one by one.

I would strongly advice users to go this way - the generic 
/usr/local-approach leads to a lot of confusion with people ending up 
with a mess of files in that directory. This makes debugging difficult 
and successful updates become challenging. Nothing to say against it as 
long as one really keeps track and can do a rm -R /usr/local from time 
to time - but impossible to maintain for a casual user.

Cheers,

Lars.