I installed a new version of zlib from source without using the prefix option of configure (I hate to have to type that everytime, so I just have everything in /usr/local).

Now when I was compiling something that was using zlib headers, I noticed there also was another version of zlib on my system in the /usr/X11R6 directory. This directory is before /usr/local in the search path for both libraries and include files.

Of course I can fix the library path by changing ld.so.conf, but what do I do about the include files? I can now throw away the old zlib from /usr/X11R6, but the next time I upgrade X11 it will install zlib again which will probably again be an older version than the zlib in /usr/local.

Is there a good reason for the /usr/X11R6 path to be before the /usr/local path?

Which distro is this? Mandrake, Deb or LFS? I don't know Deb well, but with mandy you should be able to uninstall the original zlib as it was from an rpm on the install cd and I wouldn't think LFS does that weird stuff, if so you can always see if it will do a make uninstall if you saved the dir you compiled it from. I don't know why the search path prefers the /etc dir but obviously you could go and use the --prefix=/etc/X11 to fix just this one prog.

zlib came with Xfree itself and I don't remember whether or not there was an option to not install zlib. There probably is, so I'll just have to remember that the next time I install X I suppose. If I forget it, things may start to go wrong again. =(