Re: Questions about building from source
On Sat, Feb 01, 2003 at 10:01:38AM -0800, Bill Moseley wrote:
>I have always built my perl (and mod_perl) from source, so I'm trying to
>get used to the Debian way. I have a few questions I hope someone can
>help with:
>
>I want to have 5.6.1 and 5.8.0 on my machine. I've built 5.8.0 from
>source and installed into /usr/local and fixed up links to the perl binary
>so "perl" still runs 5.6.1 (otherwise some package installations fail).
>
>- Is there a better or suggested way to run two installations of Perl
>under
>Debian?
Certainly for perl, that's probably the best way: keep the current
Debian packages installed to satisfy dependencies and to provide the
same version of perl to packages which are known to work with.
As far as installing 5.8.0 to /usr/local goes, that would depend on how
many machines you're trying to support. If it's only one, then a manual
build/install to /usr/local is the simplest way.
If you have multiple machines, making yourself a local .deb which
installs to /opt or /usr/local may simplify upgrading.
>- If a module is not available as a Debian package, what's the recommended
>way to install it? CPAN.pm? perl Makefile.PL? Or somehow convert it into
>a .deb?
As above, using CPAN to install to /usr/local (for both the Debian perl
packages and your locally installed 5.8.0) is probably simplest.
Another respondent suggested dh-make-perl which could be useful if you
were wanting to distribute packages (for 5.6.1) across a group of
machines. A similar machanism could be used to build local debs which
installed modules to /opt or /usr/local for 5.8.0 if you so desired.
>- The apache-perl package is not build with the modules I need (as I have
>it built on a production Solaris machine). So I was going to build my own
>mod_perl server. Will I break the debian perl installation when I make
>install mod_perl (install all the Apache::* modules)? Is there any worry
>about binary compatibility when mixing the Debian packages with
>built-from-source stuff?
You may be advised to download the debian source package (apt-get source
apache-perl), making local tweaks and building your own version of the
package.
>I'd prefer to use the debian packages as much as possible. Is the answer
>to download the debian sources when I need to build from source?
If you wish to make local tweaks or optimise for >i386 then that is a
good way to do it.
You need to be somewhat careful with what tweaks you make to perl
however, as changing some build-time options (such as threading,
multiplicity and so forth) will cause your binary to be incompatable
with packaged Debian modules.
Alternately, if you do wish to replace some debian packages with your
own installed from source binaries (and not create local packages) the
"equivs" package allows you to create dummy packages to satisfy the
dependencies formerly provided by the Debian package(s) you are
replacing.
--bod
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