Can a /opt partition be shared with several distros?

[lcorken]

I have several bootable partitions and 1 data partition. Mostly buntus. The patern seems to have settled into leap-frogging kubuntu with 2 partitions and occasionally checking out others on another partition. I like to fresh install the latest release or beta and verify it does what I want before abandoning the older one.

I have one program I compiled from source and several others I plan to. So far that's kind of a pain for me and would like to do it once in a shared partition and be done with it.

Still not sure /opt is the best or can be shared even between Karmic and Lucid and so on, much less something like Fedora or Arch.

Any opinions?

Thanks.

Ken.

[dibl]

Re: Can a /opt partition be shared with several distros?

I'm sure it can, but who knows the consequences? This has "bad idea" written all over it -- I doubt you'll hear from anyone who makes a habit of it.

As an alternative, can you just mass copy everything out of /opt into a data folder (or USB stick, or whatever), and then on your new installation, copy it out of the data folder into the new /opt?

[lcorken]

Re: Can a /opt partition be shared with several distros?

Thanks dibl. I'll give that a try.

As I think about it, it would also help to get more comfortable with compiling from source.
So far that's caused some frustration of trying to figure out what the build says is missing. Scrolling back through 1000 lines of incomprehensible weird stuff the compiler spits out only to find out 1000 lines wasn't enough.

Oh well. Time to advance and push the old gray matter.

Thanks.
Ken.

[toad]

Re: Can a /opt partition be shared with several distros?

Agree with dibl.

If the programme is compiled for a system, i.e. a specific kernel, gcc and what have you I can guarantee that it won't run if you change those parameters. That is the whole point of release cycles. Those of us running rolling release distros know about one or two pitfalls or rather marvel at the devs who keep it all together.

But hey, what is the harm in trying, It simply won't work