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

Joel Turner jturner421 at aol.com
Wed Dec 13 21:00:53 UTC 2006


mark at hethos.org wrote:

>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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>  
>
Someone else pointed out that building from source is worthwhile if you 
need features that are not in the packages.  I run Ubuntu Dapper and 
compile from svn as I wanted that type of flexibility in being able to 
add new features to mythtv as they are being developed.  That said, liek 
Ian I also create .deb packages with the checkinstall utility that 
allows for version control and provides me with the flexibility to roll 
back a release should something go awry.  There is plenty of 
documentation available on the Ubuntu forums on how to do this. 

--Joel


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