I have checked out lazarus 1.6 on the RC1 tag and now I am a bit confused regarding the make options...

I start by building lazarus in my source dir below home: make bigide

But then there is:
sudo make install

which is used to put this lazarus into /usr/local/share/lazarus

What seems to happen is that there are a number of symlinks created in /usr/local/bin for startlazarus and other items.

What I would like to know is what happens if I already have a different lazarus version that has been installed by "make install"?

Will the new lazarus replace the older or will there be some version added to the symlinks?

I don't dare to run make install until I know the end result...

The new lazarus will replace the old.

I don't dare to run make install until I know the end result...

You can always run "make -n install", it will show you what will happen without actually doing it.

Michael.

OK, thanks!
I started by installing fpc release 3.0.0 and following the make install for fpc I had to issue the symlink command to make it actually become the active version:

sudo ln -sf /usr/local/lib/fpc/3.0.0/ppcarm /usr/local/bin/ppcarm

Now I have 3 different fpc versions where 3.0.0 is the one responding to the fpc command on the terminal.
If I execute "make bigide" inside the lazarus 1.6RC1 directory it will use fpc 3.0.0 to compile.

Then I understand that "sudo make install" will replace the older lazarus with this new one, at least as the one on path.

So now I would like to know how I can proceed to start this new lazarus without destroying the settings of the existing one?

I once got a dialog when I installed a new (or really an older) version of lazarus where it asked about the fpc sources and such. I.e. it somehow sensed that there was a difference....

Do I copy the ~/.lazarus dir to a different name (like .lazarus_1.6RC1) and use the command line "startlazarus --pcp=~/.lazarus_1.6RC1"?

Will this keep the path to the old fpc for the old lazarus or how is that best done?