Installing a compiler by default

Alexander Jacob Tsykin stsykin at gmail.com
Fri Jun 9 14:51:42 BST 2006


On Friday 09 June 2006 19:26, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> 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.

That prefix is implied int eh command, it doe snot have to be used. Things 
will automatically be compiled into /usr/local, so you only specify the 
prefix if you need them to go somewhere else.
> You do have to resolve dependencies manually of course, but these are much 
> rarer than you might think, usually some underlying lib. Rinse, repeat. 
>
It's always been pretty frequent for me,andunless you know what to look for, 
you can spend a lot of time hunting for dependencies and still never find 
them.
> 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.

IN general, this is true, and in any case there are some programs not 
available for Ubuntu, however, with wine, just use the wine repository, its 
easier that compiling yourself, and certainly quicker.

Sasha



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