Re: Can I install non debian source packages?
Lo, on Tuesday, June 1, Thomas Adam did write:
> --- James Sinnamon <jps@westnet.com.au> wrote:
>
> > I am running 'testing' and am considering changing to 'unstable'.
> >
> > In any case, does this site give me any clues about how to go about
> > building non-Debian applications from source archives?
> >
> > ... or do I just try to run ./configure, then make etc, as normally
> > instructed within the package documentation?
>
> Why are you compiling it? Either way, you'll need to ensure that you have:
>
> build-essential
>
> installed. Then it is simply (ha!) a case of:
>
> ./configure [--options] && make && su -c 'make install'
>
> [--options] to ./configure is optional -- it depends how rich a
> feature-set you want. "make install" must be run as root.
>
> But unless you have a reason not to, I suggest using .deb packages
> whenever you can.
You can mitigate some of the annoyances of installing a package manually
and recover a few of the advanced features provided by dpkg (in
particular, package removal) by using stow. Stow itself is available as
a deb; see the included docs for more details.
Brief summary: with stow, you install each source package into a
separate directory (usually under /usr/local/stow, although that's
configurable); stow then creates symlinks to make it look as though the
program is in /usr/local/bin, /usr/local/lib, /usr/local/man, etc.
Removing a package is a breeze: use stow to get rid of the symlinks,
then delete the package's directory.
Richard
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