JwizBlog

How to play with Source in Debian

Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 Released

Slashdot comment originally written by Phil Hands (Slashdot ID #2365)

Here's the content:

so, you want to recompile package foo, well first you need some source

apt-get source foo

or maybe some newer source

apt-get source foo/unstable

or maybe you need the source that became available 5 minutes ago, in which case you do one of the above, drop the new tarball in the current directory, go into the old Debian source directory, and run uupdate and maybe fix some patching problems in the new directory that got created for you.

Next, you need to build this stuff, so let's get in the source directory:

cd foo-1.2.3

oh, but we might need some other development libraries to build this, so lets grab what we need

apt-get build-dep foo

that's better, now we can tweak some source or options maybe, and make ourselves a package

debuild

right, so now we have a new package, so we install it

sudo dpkg -i ../foo-1.2.3*deb

and it gets installed (or maybe it has some dependencies, if you got this far, you can work it out yourself) just like it was an official Debian package, which means you get to remove it cleanly, etc. if the need arrises.

Who ever said source was difficult to play with in Debian? Debian is by developers, for developers -- we like source. That's why we're into Free Software

Posted by jshare at February 25, 2003 06:24 PM