Easy Package Creation with CheckInstall

linux.com

18 points·jennifercloer··3 comments

I'm not a fan to be honest. Looking at the listed use cases...: All the new autotools packages can be easily uninstalled with `make uninstall`. If you actually experiment with recompilation a lot, then it's not that hard to create a safe package including all files inside DESTDIR.

And if you have 50 machines and don't know how to make proper packages, I've got bad news... Checkinstall cannot magically guess what's part of the configuration and what isn't (badly-autotooled software puts stuff in strange locations sometimes) so one day the magic that generated the package quickly, will remove your configs during an update.

Maybe CI is cool for home users, just keeping the system relatively clean - but I would never want to use it for something serious. Creating packages is trivial if software uses only `configure && make && make install`. If it isn't trivial, maybe it's a good idea to take a couple of minutes and understand what's going on?

So for me (if it's anything apart from home laptop) it comes down to: If you know how does CI work, why use it instead of going the "proper" way? If you don't know - you're safer to not use it.

Why not just use make install? Because that doesn't allow you to easily manage the software at a later date.

Eh, I don't mind just installing into my home directory with autotools.

There's also --prefix=/opt/package-ve.rs.ion

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