Quoting Steve Litt (slitt@???):

> I don't know how to do the preceding, and I'm forever prioritizing
> other things above learning it.

Well, if you have a spare hour some time, try debhelper[1] or
CheckInstall[2]. You might be surprised.


(Above and below, for the sake of present discussion, I'll assume we're
talking about a deb-based distribution. For other package toolkits and
other package-oriented distributions, there are similar toolsets.)

> I recognize what you say, freely admit that your viewpoint is a
> majority viewpoint for informed Linux users. But at a gut level, I've
> never been able to believe it.

Common ground first: In general, the stuff you put together is
(blessedly) self-contained, mostly, the very opposite of a dependency
hairball. So, the likelihood of eventual breakage because your
tarball-compiled software is unaware of the tracked packages and the
package-tracking software is unaware of your tarball-compiled software
is really small. (This is like my footnote's example of locally
compiled leafnode.)

My concern is mostly that you're giving _generally_ bad advice that is
likely to bite people if/when they keep applying it, and apply it to
software more interdependent with the rest of the system. If you merely
said 'Hey, I do this because it's convenient in this case, but you could
get in trouble if you ignore package management on a package-oriented
distro in a carefree way as if it didn't matter', I'd be fine with that.
But instead, your writings (in particular cases) go out of your way to
_specifically discourage_ people from bothering to use package
management.

Worse, your essays portray the Linux admin's choice as a dichotomy
between badly designed distro packages on the one hand and appropriately
tailored locally compiled tarballs on the other -- as if it were
impossible to use backports.org packages, unofficial repo packages, or
locally built packages the admin constructs based on tarball
compilation. E.g., using debhelper or CheckInstall.

I think your advice is quite bad for readers, in that regard. I think
people are going to get in trouble followiing it. And I think this
ought to trouble you.


> Sure, 99% of my software is package-installed and I like it that way,
> but for certain software that's very important to me, if I don't like
> the way the package does it, it's off to ./configure;make;make
> install. I regularly do this for LyX, Bluefish, Sigil, and all the
> process supervisors.

I have absolutely no problem with that. (Again, like me with leafnode.)
But then, it's really odd that you don't do the extra 10% work to make a
local .deb out of that. At which point, by the way, you could then also
help others by offering it to the public.

And, if you had bothered to read what I said upthread, and in my
footnote, that's what I've been saying.

Or, you _might_ be able to save yourself even the trouble of compiling
locally (and then having to keep on top of updates and maintenance
forever after that) if you find that someone else with an unofficial
.deb repo is doing the work so you don't have to.

IMO, you keep doing your readers a disservice by never mentioning these
things. (My opinion, yours for a small fee. And if I didn't respect
and value you as a writer, I wouldn't bother to say this.)


[1] https://faceted.wordpress.com/2011/05/18/howto-build-a-trivial-debian-package-with-dh_make/
[2] http://checkinstall.izto.org/