Updating without Apt

On Fri, Jun 29, 2007 at 06:27:23PM -0700, Andrew Gray wrote:
> My name is Andrew, and I use Debian Lenny on an x86 machine.
>

[...]
> The software in question is emacs22. Currently I have it compiled in my
> home directory at ~/source/emacs/, where I run it directly out of the
> src directory. I dare not "make install", or my apt install will be
> permanently harmed and/or it won't work and I will be faced with a
> crippled, non-running version of emacs on my system.

[...]
>
> Is there anything I can do to ensure that if I did a make install it
> wouldn't affect my current install or something like that?
>

while I've not built emacs from source before, the SOP for these sorts
of things is to install local packages into /usr/local/

generally there are ./configure options you can set to change the
install directory. Debian packages will not touch /usr/local, so
you'll be good to go. YOu could even statically link program so that
you won't have to worry about libraries upgrading underneath you.

hth.

A

Andrew Gray writes:
> I love Debian. I love apt. The Debian/Apt combination has allowed me to use
> software I would have never before dreamed to be possible to use. I'm quite
> content with my system at the moment. My problem comes when a piece of
> software that I use with frequency is updated by the developers in a major
> way. The Debian repositories do not reflect this change, and likely won't
> for some time.

> The software in question is emacs22.

toncho/~ apt-cache madison emacs
emacs | 22.0.99+1-1 | ftp://ftp.us.debian.org experimental/main Packages
emacs | 21.4a+1-5 | ftp://ftp.us.debian.org unstable/main Packages
emacs21 | 21.4a+1-5 | ftp://ftp.us.debian.org unstable/main Sources
emacs22 | 22.0.99+1-1 | ftp://ftp.us.debian.org experimental/main Sources

--
John Hasler

--

Andrew Gray wrote:
> My name is Andrew, and I use Debian Lenny on an x86 machine.
>
> I love Debian. I love apt. The Debian/Apt combination has allowed me to
> use software I would have never before dreamed to be possible to use.
> I'm quite content with my system at the moment. My problem comes when a
> piece of software that I use with frequency is updated by the developers
> in a major way. The Debian repositories do not reflect this change, and
> likely won't for some time.
>
> The software in question is emacs22.

I would be surprised if a major update to emacs weren't in
sid within a few days, if not hours.

> Currently I have it compiled in my
> home directory at ~/source/emacs/, where I run it directly out of the
> src directory. I dare not "make install", or my apt install will be
> permanently harmed and/or it won't work and I will be faced with a
> crippled, non-running version of emacs on my system. Not only that, but
> with this compilation I was able to enable GTK for the X11 run of emacs.
> I loved having that kind of flexibility with my compilation.
>
> Is there anything I can do to ensure that if I did a make install it
> wouldn't affect my current install or something like that?

As was suggested else-thread, you can probably do:
configure --prefix=/usr/local && make && make install.
(I'm not an emacs user, so the build may be more complicated
than that, but this will very likely work.) In fact, /usr/local
is the defaul prefix, so you don't even need that. In other
words, you can make install, since it will install to /usr/local/bin,
rather than /usr/bin and not interfere with the version installed
via apt at all. If you want to test it more carefully, try

make DESTDIR=/tmp/foo install

and examine the resulting tree in /tmp/foo. You should only get
executables in /usr/local/bin.

However, you might want to look into apt pinning. This allows
you to pull emacs from sid without requiring you to update your
entire system to sid, and will give you the updates more
quickly. Or, you can simply download the .deb files from
sid and install them with dpkg. If the upstream is truly
not showing up in sid for too long, that won't work. If
that is the case, you can grab the .dsc from sid and make
the modifications yourself to create a newer deb.

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