compiling from source

[Stephen R Laniel]

On Wed, Nov 09, 2005 at 02:20:06PM -0600, Samuel Thurston, III wrote:
> if i have an older version of a package installed from a .deb, should i
> uninstall that before installing a new version from source?  is it very
> difficult to build my own debs from a generic tarball?

Ordinarily you don't need to uninstall the one before
installing the other. Compiled packages normally go into
/usr/local/bin and so forth rather than in /usr/bin, so
things don't normally collide. I think there can be problems
(e.g., I seem to remember that the compiled version of
Firefox consults config files in a common location, but I
could be wrong about that), but as a first try you shouldn't
feel any hesitation about installing both at once.

As for the difficulty: most often it's not very difficult.
You just have to do

make && make install

as root.

-- 
Stephen R. Laniel
steve at laniels.org
+(617) 308-5571
http://laniels.org/
PGP key: http://laniels.org/slaniel.key
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-users/attachments/20051109/a39bb332/attachment.sig>