[vox-tech] Compile Question

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Henry House (hajhouse at houseag.com):

> I'm glad you were able to make progress.
> 
> Tips for future reference:
> 
> - "dpkg -l |grep kde" tells you if you have any packages with "kde" in their
>   names installed
> - Debian development packages almost always are named lib*dev, so, for
>   example, you know that you don't have what you need to compile with KDE
>   if you don't have a package with both kde and dev in its name.

Good tips.

I'm sure there are exceptions, but in my experience, and with a few
exceptions[1], if you find yourself compiling a tarball[2] to install a
package on Debian, you're almost certainly solving the wrong problem.
That is, you really, really want to stay within the package regime if
reasonably possible.

Part of the trick to finding your way around Debian stubbornly searching
around for the _right_ way to go about things.  (I'm glad to help, when
I know something relevant.)

[1] The one that comes readily to mind is my desire to run pre-2.0 betas
of the leafnode NNTP daemon, because only the betas support local
newsgroups.  Fortunately, it's a straightforward compile withonly one
dependency, the PCRE library.  The first time I set up leafnode 2.0x, 
that way, I likewise built libpcre from source tarball, and installed
both within /usr/local.  Later, I realised that I didn't need to do
that:

~ $ dpkg -l | grep libpcre
ii  libpcre3       4.5-1.1        Perl 5 Compatible Regular Expression Library
ii  libpcre3-dev   4.5-1.1        Perl 5 Compatible Regular Expression Library


[2] Not to be confused with building a Debianised source package, in
such a way as to compile & build a binary .deb .  That's a separate and
worthwhile topic, covered somewhat in my link farm page, "Information"
on http://linuxmafia.com/kb/Debian/ .

-- 
Cheers,   There are 10 types of people in this world, those who know quaternary,
Rick Moen those who only recently figured out Ron Fabre's "ternary" .sig, those
          who're completely confused, and those who hate self-referential jokes.