compiling one program, not all, from a source package

[Harald Sitter]

On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 8:47 PM, Mackenzie Morgan <macoafi at gmail.com> wrote:
> I, for one, find the OP's question intriguing and would be interested
> in finding out whether there's an answer.

Doing it as a package is non-trivial, because obviously the monolithic
tarball's packaging assumes a monolithic build. The non-package way
would be:

apt-get source kde-workspace
apt-get build-dep kde-workspace
cd kde-workspace
<apply patch>
mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr
make kwin
cd kwin
sudo make install

Doing this with a package as result is rather a lot of mind twisting.
It would essentially start off the same, but then you need to manually
run parts of the dpkg build process and eventually end up in a dead
end etc.
apt-get source kde-workspace
apt-get build-dep kde-workspace
cd kde-workspace
<apply patch>
make -f debian/rules configure
cd obj*
make kwin
cd kwin
make install DESTDIR=../../debian/kwin
<at this point you would have to fake some (a lot) debhelper files to
make dh believe that all sorts of stuff was built and installed and
stuff>
<at this point you would have to find a way to only execute the binary
target for *one* package, which I do not think is possible, at least
not with dh>

so, from where I am standing it is usually a better idea to simply
sudo make install kwin for quick testing and for a more permanent
solution one will have to rebuild the entire shebang (also to meet the
countless binary version requirements that packages have with each
other)