dear all,

i'm still on slack but am going to install arch 0.7 tonite.

my main question is: i read quite a lot on ABS and pacman, still i'm not sure what i should do if i want to compile from source.

practical example: i use a lot this p2p program called lopster. on slack, i downlaoded the sources, and compiled simply doing a common procedure:What would that be in arch? do i first need to create an arch package with ABS and then install it with pacman?

thank you for all inputs...

cheers,

aj.

I can't remember the details. You need to install cvs and I think 'abs' is its own thing, too. Then you can sync to the build scripts and modify them but I can't remember if its necessary to do all that just to build your own from scratch. But you do have the basic principle - create the arch package and then pacman it as normal. It's just like a complicated 'makepkg' or a more difficult 'checkinstall'. Check the arch website and there's a rather confusing document about it and then try the arch forums which, unfortunately (I guess) are more active than LQ's subforum, and search that for tips. I need to refresh my memory the next time I'm in arch but that's part of the reason I'm happily back in Slack. Things are just more direct and simple. I think the specific command is 'pacman -A path/to/your/package' and I don't think the 'custom repository' is actually that important.

Sorry, this answer sucks, but my point is to search those places for the details and then ignore half of them.

-- Yeah, basically this: http://www.archlinux.org/docs/en/gui...guide.html#abs

But really, just write a buildscript, do makepkg, and then do 'pacman -[something, I think 'A']'.

You could write a PKGBUILD for the software and then post it on the forum to give back to the community, or you could just download the source, ./configure, make, make install and manually compile it. Either way works fine from your perspective

Pretty much, yes. If you want it installed as a package that you can then remove automatically, then you need to do just that. If you aren't bothered about creating a package, the traditional
./configure
make
make install
should still work just fine.

thank you all for this.

still on slack right now, i guess i have some hard times letting go a config that pretty much fits my needs, and i'm in lack of time.

will try arch soon, though.

cheers,

aj.