[arch-general] Question about installing libraries

[Evangelos Foutras]

On Fri, Oct 22, 2010 at 1:42 AM, Christian <christian08 at runbox.com> wrote:
> So my question is if I get a such package, may I just extract it, unpack the
> data.tar.gz and copy the libraries into /usr/lib?
> For example, I now need to use pygame1.8 and there is 1.9 in the arch
> repository.
> What do you think?

You really want to avoid having random untracked files lying around in
your system; you want to create packages with them so they are tracked
by pacman.

A good solution for your problem might be the following:

Grab an older revision of the PKGBUILD, change pkgname to something
like python-pygame-1.8 and build it. To find the revision you need to
fetch, consult the svn log [1]. In this case, for example, you'd want
r43882. To checkout that revision use:

svn co -r43882 svn://archlinux.org/packages/python-pygame/trunk
python-pygame-1.8

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[1] http://repos.archlinux.org/wsvn/packages/python-pygame/trunk/?op=log&isdir=1&