Nate Bargmann wrote: > Hi Miles, et. al. > > As an upstream developer/maintainer and downstream user of packages both > locally built and packaged, I've come to the conclusion that, at least > in the case of Debian, building from source is for "those who know what > they are doing." On the one hand, given the wide array of prebuilt > packages available, why should anyone build from source? On the other, > if one is on Stable there may well be a package that becomes unusable > for reasons beyond Debian (occurred with an amateur radio package during > Squeeze as I recall), yet it will not be addressed by the project (an > updated backport was never provided for Squeeze as I recall). > > At least due to the FHS Debian has never taken steps to violate the idea > that /usr/local is reserved for the local administrator. As a user of > GNU Autotools in the projects I am involved in this is a good thing as > this is the Autotools default destination directory. > > As I see it, project maintainers/developers should take care to properly > document the specific installation instructions including build options > in the INSTALL file included as part of an Autotools source archive > tarball. As an upstream all I ask is that the distribution stay out of > my way for local builds so they can be installed to expected locations > in the file system or in user specified locations. I also expect > distributions to provide reasonably up to date tools in their latest > releases so the user can build the project successfully. > > That said, it is quite another thing for someone to want to take a > source package and make a local binary package (.deb in our case) to be > installed using the package management system. That is well beyond my > scope and interest as an upstream developer and I would expect the > distribution to provide timely and clear documentation and the tools for > doing so. > > In short, as an upstream it's my job to make sure that 'configure; make; > make install' "just work" and is documented and it's the distribution's > job to make sure its packaging system is documented. Did I explain it > well enough to see where the line of responsibility between upstream and > distribution lies and their responsibility to the user?
One problem with locally built software is managing dependencies. Another is being able to uninstall. I found that using the program 'checkinstall' instead of 'make install' will create and install a debian package, that you can later remove using dpkg. Cheers, Joel > - Nate > > -- > > "The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all > possible worlds. The pessimist fears this is true." > > Ham radio, Linux, bikes, and more: http://www.n0nb.us > _______________________________________________ > Dng mailing list > [email protected] > https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng -- Joel Roth _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list [email protected] https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
