Installing a compiler by default

[Alan McKinnon]

On Friday 09 June 2006 06:21, Chanchao wrote:
> I feel very qualified to answer this as I wouldn't know how to use
> a C compiler if my life depended on it.

It's easy, and soon becomes very natural. You download the sources for 
the program you want to compile, and extract them to some place safe 
like your home directory. This almost always creates a new directory 
with the sources inside, so cd into this. Almost always there's a 
README file, perhaps an INSTALL file, so you read them. And almost 
always the code uses autotools to do the compilation, which almost 
always uses these three commands:

./configure
make
sudo make install

Somewhere in there you normally supply a '--prefix=/usr/local' to keep 
the actual Ubuntu stuff and your compiled stuff separate. You do have 
to resolve dependencies manually of course, but these are much rarer 
than you might think, usually some underlying lib. Rinse, repeat.

The Ubuntu packagers do a very good job but they can't keep on top of 
every package out there, some projects move so fast that you need to 
do it yourself to stay current. wine especially comes to mind, there 
are 100s of others. Don't shy away from using the compiler - you have 
to try really hard to break stuff using it.

-- 
If only me, you and dead people understand hex, 
how many people understand hex?

Alan McKinnon
alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za
+27 82, double three seven, one nine three five