Re: New Debian user here
Ivo said:
> Will I pollute my system to death if I start compiling some of my stuff
> by myself? I'd hate to miss doing the occasional ./configure && make :)
> For example: the first thing I did was download the tar.gz for kernel
> 2.4.19 and installed that, rather than the 2.4.18-5 package I saw
> available in dselect.
depends, in the case of the kernel, not really since apt-get doesn't
do anything with the kernel(e.g. auto upgrade) unless explicitly told
to. as for other things, depends as well, when I compile stuff I try
to make it self contained that is, put it in it's own directory
in /usr/local. But in general yes you will seriously pollute the
system if you compile a buncha stuff that is not debianized. When
I first switched from slackware I did the same thing(~1998-2000),
by the time debian potato came out, my system had thousands of
changes and basically it would of been impossible to upgrade the
system without serious breakage I think.
You can download the sources from the tree of debian your using
and recompile them, in some cases you can even get testing and or
unstable sources from the other trees and compile them(depends
on the package). Example is about 6 months ago I needed OpenLDAP
2.0.23 on potato, so I grabbed the sources from woody and changed
a couple compile options so it'd compile on potato and bang it
works fine and has been for 6 months.
if your interested in bleeding edge stuff your probably more
happy using testing or unstable. Maybe I will switch back to
testing at some point in the future, at the moment stable has
everything I need and more ..
>
> I guess this is true for packages that have dependencies or on which
> others are dependent. But is there some kind of good practice for
> compiling your own stuff or is there basically no way to mix compiling
> tar.gz's and installing .deb's and still keep a completely healthy
> system?
you can compile all you want and keep a healthy system if you install
to /usr/local (or /opt if thats your thing..) and don't change existing
configuration(e.g. if you were to compile xfree 4.2 don't overwrite
the existing xfree files, reconfigure the system so it uses your xfree
instead of the system one), try to make debian packages whenever possible
to keep the system in synch, and if possible make the stuff self contained
inside of it's own directory(e.g. configure with
--with-prefix=/usr/local/appname). the stow program can assist in this
I believe, though I have not personally tried it.
good luck
nate
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