./configure variations

[Zach]

configure scripts are unique to the source code that they come with. 
As such there's no way to document how to make them work in any
general, yet useful way.

If  you untarred the source, and the README says to run the configure
script, yet the configure script isn't working, then it is broken.  I
know this seems obvious, but my point is that there's no documentation
that will tell you what your'e doing wrong, because you aren't doing
anything wrong.  It's just broken.

If this is the case, then fixing it requires some understanding of
shell scripts, so that you can look at the output to see where it's
failing then edit the configure script to fix the broken part.

Here are a couple of suggestions.

Post the output from the configure script to the list, and maybe
somebody can make sense of where it's breaking.

See if somebody has packaged the program you want already by googling
for "<program name> deb", or "<program name> rpm".  If you find an rpm
of the program you need you might be able to use alien to convert it
to a deb.

If you do get the program to compile, consider using the
"checkinstall" utility, in place of the "make install" step.  This
will generate a package that can then be easily installed or removed. 
Read up on checkinstall first.  Installing stuff from source is a sure
way to wind up with an unmaintainable system.

On 11/8/05, alex <radsky at ncia.net> wrote:
> August Karlstrom wrote:
>
> > Matt Galvin wrote:
> >
> >> In most cases the software you are looking for is probably already
> >> availible in Ubuntu without having to compile anything.
> >
> >
> > Yes, but my impression is that the available precompiled versions
> > quite often are not up to date (sometimes *very* out of date, like
> > several years).
> >
> >
> > August
> >
> Yes, this is why I was trying to install Prozilla-2.0-CVS-19-2005 via
> the tarball route. I wasn't able to find it any other way.
>
> alex
>
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