[mythtv-users] To install from source or apt-get ?

Mark Hetherington mark at hethos.org
Wed Dec 13 20:42:37 UTC 2006


On Thursday 14 December 2006 03:49, devsk wrote:
> I am not sure what the lure of Ubuntu is but if you are looking for an easy
> to install distro which can install packages automatically from source with
> tonnes of configurability (like whether you want aac or not), you should
> look at sabayon linux. Its gentoo at its core, so you can use portage to
> install pretty much everything from source. Portage is probably the best
> pkg mgr out there with dep tracking and choice of configure options
> (automagically determined from your USE flags) that you can pass to a
> package.
>
> -devsk
>
apt-get allows you to get source, and automatically build it into packages. It 
also includes build scripts to make sure it is built properly with one 
build-package command, and has a patch management system, to allow the 
maintainer to add security patches against the upstream distribution etc.

I don't see any reason you wouldn't apt-get install the package if it was 
available. While I can't guarantee the same experience on ubuntu, on debian I 
upgraded from .18 to .19 to .20 without a problem. If you need to alter 
compile time configuration, you can "apt-get source mythtv", then modify the 
compile options as you wish, then build-package it to give you a package with 
your customisations that will slot straight into the place of the old 
package. I haven't come across a situation yet that apt-get and it's 
accompanying utils didn't handle gracefully. (I have on the other hand not 
known that it handled some situations when I first approached them, wasting 
lots of time mucking around doing it the "hard way" before realising there 
was a "debian way" and it was easy.)

Having said all that, I imagine portage handles things quite nicely as well, 
it's just a different approach to the "software problem".

But either way, I think you should probably install from packages instead of 
source, unless you have some good reason not to. (i.e. you *really* want to 
run an unpackaged version of mythtv.)

Mark


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