Installing a compiler by default

[Chanchao]

On Fri, 2006-06-09 at 11:26 +0200, Alan McKinnon 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. 

Sorry, I could have added that I don't think this limits my enjoyment of
life in any way. :)

> 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.

Right.  :)

And even if all of that succeeds then I have to put all kinds of files
in various locations manually, perhaps create links, and then it still
doesn't show up in the menus, then I try to add it manually, then I go
hunt for an icon...   I think I'll wait until it's in the repositories.
And if something is THAT fringe that it's not in the repositories then
where would I go for any support?  In that case I'll just pass.

Cheers,
Chanchao