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Comment by samatman | Hacker News Reader

A terminal program is quite easy to pin, though, just do this:

    - $package-manager install $program 
    - which $program
    - cp $program ~/my/own/directories
    - $package-manager uninstall $program

done. It won't ever change by accident.

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Not quite that simple. You can't just pin the program itself, you also have to pin its dependencies. Which means you have to run ldd to get the libraries it loads (whether directly or transitively), and copy those too, and then you patch the program and its dependencies to set the rpath to $ORIGIN/my/own/directories, then you have to examine all the other more subtle application-level gotchas (e.g. path search order for config files, hard-coded absolute paths, etc.) and port those too. Once you're done, congratulations! You've done 50% of the work of a package manager.

Yeah, I wish this kind of thing[0] were a core POSIX tool which worked reliably on all systems and binaries. Bit of an oversight, that.

[0]: https://github.com/greenpau/statifier

Nice. Then I will not hesitate to break the UI in my upcoming terminal program releases. (... they are quite well designed in my head.)

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