Change installation location of AUR apps?

poltak · 2011-07-14 15:14:23

Hi, just a quick question, that I have no idea how to do:

Recently built a new computer with an SSD for OS's and 1TB HDD for apps, games, storage etc.

Arch is installed on a single partition on my SSD and the HDD is formatted NTFS and mounted to /media/storage via fstab.

I use a lot of apps from the AUR and I've noticed they install by default to the /opt directory. This is annoying since that defaults to my SSD, and to decrease the read/writes to disk, I'd like to change that default installation path onto my NTFS HDD... is this possible?

If so, how would I do it?

Also, an additional related question: Can I also change the default installation path of apps installed via the default pacman repositories?

Thanks very much for your time.

falconindy · 2011-07-14 15:34:15

This doesn't make sense. AUR packages install to wherever they're ./configure'd to install to, or more generally, where the package() function points them to install to. If the packager declares that as /opt, then it's /opt. Most will not be installed to /opt and you're either embellishing your experience or you've been extremely "lucky" in the packages you've found. Installations to /opt occur for various reasons, but among them is not strictly because the package comes from the AUR.

Do not try to affect the installation path via pacman. If you want to install to a different location, you need to change where the PKGBUILD puts the files.

Furthermore, installing linux programs to an NTFS partition is a bad idea™, as permissions and ownership will not be preserved. There's no guarantee that this won't adversely affect how the program runs.

Last edited by falconindy (2011-07-14 15:37:15)

fsckd · 2011-07-14 15:36:20

Mount opt from a directory on the hard drive using mount bind thingy.

Also, why NTFS? The permissions would likely be quite less than normal.

poltak · 2011-07-14 15:49:36

NTFS because I was mainly intending to be using that HDD for Windows. I just assumed my Gentoo and Arch apps could be easily installed alongside the Windows apps on that HDD... I think I was wrong. Not much experience with Windows/Windows filesystem.

So, falconindy, are you mean that I can just change a PKGBUILD variable to specify an alternate install path? And I will probably make an ext partition now on my HDD, but just out of curiosity, what would happen if I put them on the NTFS formatted partition?

Arch Linux

#1 2011-07-14 15:14:23

Change installation location of AUR apps?

#2 2011-07-14 15:34:15

Re: Change installation location of AUR apps?

#3 2011-07-14 15:36:20

Re: Change installation location of AUR apps?

#4 2011-07-14 15:49:36

Re: Change installation location of AUR apps?

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