Brain on Fire » Blog feed Tim McCormack says words

Install tarred and zipped source as a Debian package

Automated disclaimer: This post was written more than 15 years ago and I may not have looked at it since.

Older posts may not align with who I am today and how I would think or write, and may have been written in reaction to a cultural context that no longer applies. Some of my high school or college posts are just embarrassing. However, I have left them public because I believe in keeping old web pages alive—and it's interesting to see how I've changed.

Problem
Using the command sudo make install is not too hard, but it does produce one problem: uninstallation. Packages are a much better distribution method, but many authors only distribute make-able source archives instead of .deb or .rpm files.
Solution

Use the "checkinstall" package to package up the installation process and allow easy uninstallation. (If you don't have checkinstall, get it now using sudo apt install checkinstall.)

  1. Extract source: tar jxvf gnome-schedule-0.9.0.tar.bz2
  2. Go into created folder: cd gnome-schedule-0.9.0
  3. Get ready for installation: ./configure
  4. Compile code: make
  5. Install: checkinstall --default (This is instead of make check and sudo make install)
  6. The program is now installed, and there is a nice little .deb file in the current directory.
Notes
It would be nice to have a GUI feature which would allow instant installation of source packages, automating the above steps.
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