Need workaround for outdated csound version

[Robert Persson]

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Ubuntu's version of csound is massively outdated. Version 5 came out
in 2005, but ubuntustudio still ships with version 4.23. This is a
problem because some important sound applications, such as Blue,
require version 5.

Unfortunately updating it is not as simple as finding a more recent
rpm and using alien to convert it to a deb package. For instance a
version numbering quirk makes the packman version (packman is a 3rd
party repository for SuSE) look older than the ubuntu version---the
ubuntu version is numbered 1:4.23... whereas the packman version is
numbered 0:5.... Another problem is that the packman csound is divided
into several smaller packages, as opposed to Ubuntu's single big
package. Since the ubuntustudio-audio metapackage depends on csound,
messing about with any of this stuff is going to cause package
management headaches of one sort or another. I also know that the
fedora binaries have been compiled with several some important
features disabled, such as the Loris opcodes.

The csound sources contain some of the extra stuff that you need to
build a .deb package, however when I tried to create one using
dpkg-buildpackage I got a completely uninformative error message. So
that doesn't look like the way to go either.

That leaves the option of either installing one of the prebuilt binary
tar.gz packages from sourceforge, or of building from source. However
I don't want to have a version of csound in /usr and a different
version in /usr/local because that also might become a very big
headache, in which case the only option I can see is build from
source, but to configure it to install into /usr  rather than
/usr/local. This would obviously mean simply overwriting the files
installed using dpkg/apt. This would obviously be pretty ugly too, but
I reckon that it shouldn't have any adverse side effects and that it
should simply correct itself once the Ubuntu maintainers finally get
around to version 5.

Still, as I said, this is a very ugly solution. Is there a better one
I haven't thought of?

Robert
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