*- On 24 Aug, John Foster wrote about "Need tips on using apt with src" > I recently tried using apt pointed at the source codes on potato. I want > to try getting it to compile several applications to run on slink. This > seemed to work until apt tried to compile the app (newt30) that I > wanted. It kept giving error codes and failed to compile. I read all the > docs and checked for mail on this, no luck. Anyone had any positive > results doing this? I think this is a great idea if it can be made to > work. The error codes seemed to be based on several dependencies. I > tried several different app sources ( slang, apt, etc.) with no positive > results. I also noted that apt created a directory with the app name > also. I thought it was supposed to build a .deb file and install it. Any > thoughts on that?
The main problem with building the sources is that the debian source packages do not have any kind of dependencies like the binary packages do. So apt does not know that you need a certain -dev package to compile the package of interest. If a package build fails during a compile it will usually fail on a missing header file. Try using the contents search at http://www.debian.org/distrib/packages.html to find out what binary package contains that header. Another rule of thumb that I use is to look at the package dependices and if for example it needs libc6 then it will most likely need libc6-dev installed to be able to compile. Yes it will create a directory read the apt-get man page. It has to extract the source archive somewhere. If the build is successfull you will have the .deb and the source tree in the current directory where you ran apt-get. I have created a directory for all my source packages and just cd to it before running apt-get source. If it built it succsefully you then have to manually install with dpkg -i. -- Brian --------------------------------------------------------------------- Mechanical Engineering [EMAIL PROTECTED] Purdue University http://www.ecn.purdue.edu/~servis ---------------------------------------------------------------------
