Install multiple versions of same software with pkg/other tools

[Tracker]

Is there some way to install multiple instances of some software using pkg? say
chrome1 (used for browsing),
chrome2 (used for scraping without any interaction with chrome1),
chrome3 (for any other use you may imagine) ..... and so on

Ideally I woudl prefer to use the simplest solution possible (pkg? since it's default), don't want to do the complexity of jails, chroot etc

 

[kpedersen]

I wrote a solution for OpenBSD (pkg_bundle) but due to lack of interest, I never ported it to FreeBSD

Some more info here.

Perhaps you can look at some of the quirks from pkg_bundle and extract the different versions of chrome manually? In theory, FreeBSD has better backwards compatibility than OpenBSD so should work better for this task.

 

[dkh]

I might be missing something but what would having multiple instances installed do that using different profiles wouldn't do? You would be using the same base install but with different settings (addons etc).

If you really need multiple installations you could always leverage jails.

 

[cracauer@]

Is there some way to install multiple instances of some software using pkg? say
chrome1 (used for browsing),
chrome2 (used for scraping without any interaction with chrome1),
chrome3 (for any other use you may imagine) ..... and so on

You don't need multiple installs for that, in fact it wouldn't do what you want.

You want multiple profiles with `--user-data-dir=profiledir`. Each one can be logged into things independently and each one can have its own set of extensions.

 

[kpedersen]

Ah I see, misread the requirement (thought they wanted different versions).

It would be easy to simply create three different user accounts and run Chrome for the different use-cases in each.

 

[Tracker]

Perhaps you can look at some of the quirks from pkg_bundle and extract the different versions of chrome manually?

Thanks - was hoping for a native solution and something easier perhaps without looking at doing much.

I might be missing something but what would having multiple instances installed do that using different profiles wouldn't do? You would be using the same base install but with different settings (addons etc).

Could be launching a scraping script with another huge instance that you don't want to lose history of (imagine 1000s tabs) , programmatically would just be easier to reference chrome2 rather than open another profile.

If you really need multiple installations you could always leverage jails.

Was looking to avoid that - simplest solution possible

You want multiple profiles with `--user-data-dir=profiledir`

Yea, this seems like a chrome specific solution, not a native FreeBSD one - I was hoping pkg might offer installing multiple instances maybe under a different name or something? Also I'm not sure if chrome has default flags by default that seem to show up in `htop` at least and might need to be included.

 

[dkh]

It's kind of a generic principle of the way unix works. There is practically no reason to install two instances of the same software (maybe if you wanted a different set of compile options for a very specific reason). You would just start two instances using different configurations. For instance if you are using bash there is only one instance of bash installed but it's being used all over the place by different users and processes with no ill effect.

If, with your specific example, you find typing chrome and chrome2 easier than typing chrome --user-data-dir=chrome1 and chrome --user-data-dir=chrome2, you can always use a shell alias or script and bury the details in there. Most likely you would be starting from a gui launcher where you could abstract it away as well. If you are using separate profiles you're not going to lose all your tabs because you start a new instance - not sure why that would be a thing.

 

[Phishfry]

To me it seems like the way we handle external applications is flawed.

With disk sizes not a concern we should have statically compiled programs instead of this shared library concept..
so.2 files and all that jazz. Urg makes me shivver. The amount of times I have made symlinks to the old library to make an application work. Firefox and Seamonkey fight among themselves.

Why you can't statically compile every external application? I never really got a good answer.

I installed SeaMonkey Linux version so I have two SeaMonkeys working. One native and one with linuxator I planted in /opt.

 

[Phishfry]

I know that statically compiling an Xorg App is a silly prospect.

I did flashrom and ytree. It really comes down to depedencies. The more the harder it is.