kinda newbie question

[Damien Elmes]

Kim Holburn <kim.holburn at anu.edu.au> writes:

> Are you suggesting that we give up everything that doesn't come pre-compiled
> from a distributor?
> 
> Or just live with a nice package management system with the occasional
> splatter of files from a diy release?

basically, yes. if i want the source to something and it's in debian, i can do 

'apt-get source package'

then you get the source with all the niceties of a package management system.

if you don't, then you have to rely on smoke and mirrors. the aforementioned
'make install' wrapper can help you keep source installations tracked, but you
still need to use something like 'equivs' under debian to generate the
dependencies other applications may rely on. 

if you do need to live with source extra to your distrib, and it's more than
one or two packages, then it's probably worth looking into.

> Putting everything in /usr/local (shudder) or /opt is one option. Of course
> you have to hope that everything really does go there.

almost any well written application installs there by default, by convention.
things like autoconf automate this process so you can easily specify
alternative locations.

cheers,

-- 
Damien Elmes
resolve at repose.cx