Re: Installing old tarballs on a new Debian system

[Jim McCloskey <mcclosk@ucsc.edu>]

cga <cga2001@softhome.net> wrote:

|> I am currently switching to Debian and I have a bunch of utilities,
|> wmaker applets, etc.. in source format that I would like to reinstall
|> on the new system. Unfortunately a number of these are not available
|> as .deb's.
|>
|> As I see it I can either copy them to /usr/local/tarballs & do the
|> usual ./configure/make/ make-install dance or try to create .deb's
|> myself. This last approach being probably the more dangerous.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by `clean'  in this context, but
there are certain applications that I have routinely compiled and
installed in /usr/local/ and it hasn't led to any kind of problem so
far. Debian just ignores that part of the directory tree so things
mostly just live in there happily ever after, un-molested by the
package-management system.

Maybe there'd be some advantage to creating personalized debs, but I
can't at least for the moment think what it might be.

I suppose there is some risk that you would purge some library needed
by an application in /usr/local/, if you use a tool like deborphan or
aptitude to keep your system spare. Since the package management
system won't know that something in /usr/local/ needs the library, it
might present you with the opportunity/temptation to purge it (in the
case that none of your installed debs depends on it). All I know,
though, is that, even though I'm fond of deborphan and use it
regularly, this hasn't been a problem for me in the years that I've
been hand-compiling certain things in the /usr/local/ space,

Cheers,

Jim