Re: make "apt-get install $PKG" work like gentoo?

[Reco <recoverym4n@gmail.com>]

 Hi.

On Sun, 17 Aug 2014 03:00:59 +1000
Zenaan Harkness <zen@freedbms.net> wrote:

> I'm wondering if "apt-get install" could be set up to compile from
> source and install that (sort of automatically), rather than install
> the binary?

apt-get, to my best knowledge, can not be used for this.
There's tool called apt-build, which can do most of the things you
describe.


> And something that seems even more appealing to me is an apt-get
> source resulting in a git repo, and then "upgrade" for that package
> becomes just "git pull; recompile, rebuild debian package; install" -
> the git pull for a Linux kernel upgrade for example, is much smaller
> than downloading source and binary packages, and provides a full
> source archive - having been a programmer, this seems quite appealing.

You need to take build-dependencies into the account, as you can not
rebuild the source without them.
I'll be more like 'apt-get update && apt-get upgrade' for build-depends
and only then "git pull; recompile, rebuild debian package; install".

And even for the Debian stable build-depends' updates come annoyingly
frequently these days :)


I tried to use apt-build, and it kinda worked, but it wasn't pretty
sight. Build-dependencies ate huge amounts of disk space, build times
were painfully large (compiling stock Wheezy kernel on QNAP takes about
1.5 days, for example).

So I said to myself 'screw it', took Core i7 desktop, made a couple of
chroots on it and is building everything there since then. Maintaining
a local repository with pre-built binary packages is much less hassle
IMO.

Reco