On Sun, 11 Nov 2007, Theo v. Werkhoven wrote:-
<snip>
>Most likely the files inside the tar belong to a program in
>source-code, which you have to compile before you can run the
>program. Luckely, most source file programs are made with the help
>of autoconf(1), which gives the end-user a 'configure' script to
>adapt the program to his own environment.
>Run 'configure --help' and you see several options to further adapt
>the program to your liking.
>After 'configure' has finished, it leaves a 'Makefile' script, which
>is used by 'make(1)' to finely compile the program into an executable.
>
>The last step is to install the executable, together with man-pages
>and configuration files. This can be done with 'make install', or
>with 'checkinstall', which makes an rpm file for you.
There's also the possibility that the archive contains a spec file that
can be used to build the rpm as well. If one is present, using one of
the commands:
rpmbuild -ta $archive.tar.bz2
rpmbuild -ta $archive.tar.gz
rpmbuild -ta $archive.tgz
will have rpmbuild go through the following sequence:
1, make sure that any build dependencies are satisfied;
2, unpack the sources;
3, apply any patches that are required;
4, possibly create a new "configure" script to match the build system;
5, if a "configure" script is present, execute it so the executable will
reference libraries on that particular system;
6, call make to build the executable;
7, "install" the application, documents, etc. into a temporary build
environment;
8, create a binary rpm from the temporary build environment, ready for
installing, and a source rpm from the original source archive.
Not all these steps occur every time a package is built, and most often
step 4 isn't present. If there are no patches to apply, neither will
step 3.
So, probably the simplest way would be to try rpmbuild first. If it
builds properly, you get a package to install. If dependencies are
missing, install those and rebuild.
If there is no spec file, a bit more work is required, as described by
Theo above. As for the choice between using either "make install" or
"checkinstall", using checkinstall will create a package that can be
installed and noted in the rpm database, whereas "make install" doesn't.
The advantage is that, if at some point you try to install another rpm
package that conflicts, you get to know about it before you suffer from
unexplained problems.
Regards,
David Bolt
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