Lo, on Tuesday, June 1, Thomas Adam did write: > --- James Sinnamon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
