[PLUG] C programming

[Stuart Jansen]

On Fri, 2008-08-29 at 09:04 -0700, Rich Shepard wrote:
> On Fri, 29 Aug 2008, Stuart Jansen wrote:
> > It needed to be said, thank you for saying it. Unless you're a developer
> > or a hobbyist looking to have fun, installing from source is probably not
> > a wise decision. While it may not be hard to do, the long term maintenance
> > cost is much higher and can probably only be justified for the most
> > critical parts of one's infrastructure.
> 
>    Consider using checkinstall. It replaces 'make install' and offers the
> options of creating a package in .rpm, .deb, or .tga format (Red Hat/Fedora,
> Debian, and Slackware formats). Then upgrades or removals use the package
> management tools.

I'm familiar with checkinstall, however it has several deficiencies:

1) It only records metadata that can be programmaticly captured. For
example, it can determine required and provided symbols but it can't
determine required or provided capabilities such as "webserver". Nor, as
far as I'm aware, can it distinguish between reguirements vs.
suggestions as supported by .deb packages.

2) It does not strictly follow distribution specific conventions. Most
distributions include patches to integrate software with the system. As
a result, such packages are at best second class citizens.

3) Most importantly, you are still accepting responsibility for watching
for security and other bug fixes. Performing Q&A. Possibly backporting
patches when an upgrade is too disruptive. Etc. Doing so only makes
sense for software that is truly unique and critical to your
infrastructure. When such is the case, one might as well take a little
extra time and care to package software with the tools and conventions
of one's distro.