Compiling your own Applications from Source.

[James Gray]

On Wednesday 30 November 2005 15:19, Holger Rumland wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> I would like to compile some gnome/gkt applications by my own from the
> source tarball. Therefore I
> need to know which packages need to be installed, so that this process
> will run successful. Unfortunate
> there is no Meta package which would install the required packages all
> at once.
>
> a) what packages are required ?
> b) is there some parameter required with ./config like (./config
> --suffix) ?
>
> Thanks in advance for any help

If you want to build GTK apps, you'll need the GTK development libraries.  But 
then you'll find an application needs some other development libraries too 
(xlibs-dev etc), then another app needs some other development library....it 
starts to get ugly :P  If you want to turn your box into the "ultimate" 
development machine and neither disk space or bandwidth are an issue try 
this:

----- install-dev.sh ------
#!/bin/bash

LIST=""

# Get the list of EVERY "-dev" package...
for PACKAGE in `dpkg -l '*-dev*' | awk '{print $2}'`
do
    LIST="$LIST $PACKAGE"
done

# Now install them...all of them ("assume yes" option set)
sudo apt-get -y install $LIST

----- install-dev.sh ------

Now you have to live with every development package and all their updates too.  

A *better* option would be to read the README/INSTALL instructions for the 
software you are trying to build/compile.  If the developers have done even 
half their job, they should tell you what libraries their software depends 
on.  Library != package, but it's usually not hard to figure out (see below).

Sometimes the instructions are pretty useless.  In these cases you just have 
to try and build it, wait until the compile barfs on a missing library and 
then search for which package that library/file is part of, which isn't 
always obvious.  "apt-cache search" and Google are usually the best places to 
start :)

Have fun - and if it wasn't obvious, I *DON'T* recommend installing every 
development package!  That script was a tongue-in-cheek attempt at humour :)

James
-- 
<james> abuse me.  I'm so lame I sent a bug report to debian-devel-changes
	-- Seen on #Debian
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