How to compile software into a re-installable form? - linux

I am working through my 7th recompile of the same software. There are no pre-built packages available, and it's a long compile time. Is there a way to take what I compile and package it up so that I don't have to continually build it right from source?
EDIT: CentOS 6 for the OS if that matters.

You should have a look at CDE. From its website :
CDE (formerly known as CDEpack) automatically packages up the Code, Data, and Environment required to deploy and run your Linux programs on other machines without any installation or configuration. CDE is the easiest way to completely eliminate dependency hell.
So it will compile your program and include all the dependencies in the resulting package as well. The resulting package should be able to run on any modern x86 Linux distribution, so you won't have to continually build it right from source.

checkinstall, which is based on installwatch, is able to create various packages including .deb (Debian, Ubuntu, ...), .rpm (Red Hat, Fedora, SuSE, ...) and .tgz (Slackware) suitable for your distribution's package manager.

Related

Installing SDL2 Development version on Ubuntu Linux

I am trying to install SDL2 on Linux Ubuntu 18.04. However there are 2 types of packages available on the repository, the 'normal' library version and the development files version.
libsdl2-2.0-0/bionic-updates,bionic-security 2.0.8+dfsg1-1ubuntu1.18.04.4 amd64
Simple DirectMedia Layer
libsdl2-dev/bionic-updates,bionic-security 2.0.8+dfsg1-1ubuntu1.18.04.4 amd64
Simple DirectMedia Layer development files
What I am asking is are there differences between the two version for developing application/game using SDL2 and which one should I install if I am just starting to learn SDL2?
Ubuntu (and other Linux distributions) often divide up packages this way: the first package contains libraries and executables needed to run something compiled with the package (SDL2 in this case), the dev packages contains the headers, additional libraries or config files needed to compile a program with package. You want to install both; normally installing the dev version of the package will pull in the other as a dependency.
You will need both, most likely :)
The lib package contains the binary SDL library. That's needed to run a program.
But in order to develop an application, you need the C header files to include in your source code - assuming that you want to create a program in C or C++. The compiler needs these files to 'see' the functions provided by the lib.
If you want to use SDL library in a different way, you could also use python and python-pygame-sdl2.

How can I obtain a newer GCC? I don't have root, and can't compile it (memory error)

I have a shared account on a machine that is running an older version of GCC. I do not have root. When I try to compile GCC, my build process gets killed due to memory usage from the following command:
build/genattrtab ../../../work/gcc-6.1.0/gcc/common.md ../../../work/gcc-6.1.0/gcc/config/i386/i386.md insn-conditions.md \
-Atmp-attrtab.c -Dtmp-dfatab.c -Ltmp-latencytab.c
I'd really like to be able to compile some software on this machine that requires a newer GCC. Any suggestions are appreciated.
You can manually unpack one of the GCC packages for any major distribution, try to use the package that closely matches your distribution. These installable packages are just tar files with some meta data and install script. You can unpack them and extract binaries that you'll need. Just keep in mind that you might need to more than just gcc package. Some distributions chop their devtools into tons of small packages ( gcc, g++, binutils, gdb)
Another good source is to use pre-build gcc toolchain used by embedded vendors, sometimes these vendors include host version of gcc together with cross-compiler. For example Android NDK is one of such distributions.
Finally, you can compile GCC on another machine that is not so restrictive and copy the resulting binaries to your restrictive machine. As in case of the first approach of unpacking installable package, try to find machine that resembles your restrictive machine as close as possible. You can use tools like vagrant and docker to set-up close replica of your target machine. Vagrant and docker have a lot of pre-built templates that you can use as a jump start to create the machine you need.

how to compile apache,mysql and php in linux

I have never used Linux OS. Want to know how we can start compiling Apache,Mysql and php in Linux and is it necessary to configure it.
I tried doing it by using cd/user/scr/httpd_2.0.09
Do we need to downloads the set up from google
Do yourself a favour and don't try to compile your own webserver etc. ;)
Aside from the fact that it's a lot of work to set up the tools for compiling, resolve dependencies, and debug possible errors, you will have to do the same procedure with every tiny update – instead of simply getting a new version via your package manager.
If you use a common distribution, install the packages required for the so-called LAMP stack, and configure them properly. That will be hard enough for starters.
If you're using Ubuntu, have a look here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ApacheMySQLPHP
Actually installing binaries from repositories is less painful than compiling, but if you really want so, you may install Gentoo or other source-based distributive. I've simply described compilation of MySQL 5.5 in my blog.
To compile packages on Debian based systems you need to install build-essential and cmake package (and maybe some other *-dev packages, which appears to be missing during source configure).
For example to compile MySQL 5.5 it is enough to run:
cmake . #yep, with dot. Will prepare your source according to your system
make
make install #will install compiled binaries to system

Linux standalone 'installation' of Postgresql

For easy deployment, I'd like to ship an installation of Postgres as part of the application. Is it possible to include an already compiled and runnable version of Postgres that can be launched as process? I was able to do such thing with a Windows and MacOS version, but haven't found anything about Linux on that matter yet. Perhaps someone has tried this before and can share some insights...
You haven't stated what linux OS you're using.
Assuming it's a Redhat variant why not package your application as an RPM package? You could then declare a dependency on the standard Postgres package which would be automatically installed yum. Same principle applies if you're using Debian based systems, just a different packaging format.
From the user's perspective the OS's native packaging format is always the easiest way to install your application. Just requires effort to package it properly.
You can find cross-platform binaries from these pages on PostgreSQL official website:
For easy GUI .run installers, use links provided at http://www.enterprisedb.com/products-services-training/pgdownload.
If your target machine has no X installed on it, or you want to automate installation process with shell scripts, then you can download RPM or Deb packages from http://community.openscg.com/se/postgresql/packages.jsp
I found these links on http://www.postgresql.org/download/linux/ubuntu/, under "Cross distribution packages" and "Graphical installer".
I quote from those pages:
Note: The cross distribution packages do not fully integrate with the platform-specific packaging systems.
You must have root priviliges to install these packages, however, none of your systems library files will be altered. The supporting libraries that these binaries require are included locally as part of the install. This is the "special sauce" that allows identical binaries to run on different linux distro's.

Port a debian package to YUM for CentOS

I have a project that runs on Debian and uses many packages provided from the Debian repositories.
Because of demand, I've looked into porting the project to CentOS, but found that many of the packages I require are completely missing - at least 10 dependencies would have to be compiled manually at install time on the users machine.
My question is, what is the best way to create an installer for the user's machine? Should I use automake tools (with the standard ./configure, make, make install), to compile the required libraries, or is this a non-standard approach. Note that my app doesn't actually need to be compiled since it is written in Python, so is it weird to do a "make", when you're not compiling your own app?
Should the configure script just warn the user that package X is missing, and let them handle the rest?
Should I roll my own dependency checker by runng pkg-config manually a few times for each library required, and exit if something is missing?
I'm quite new to this, so any tips to get me moving in the right direction are appreciated.
Edit: I am familiar with RPM and yum for red hat base distros, but CentOS is missing many multimedia packages that I require. An example of one of my package dependencies is "liquidsoap" which is a programmable audio engine: http://savonet.sourceforge.net/
This is available on Debian, but not Redhat/Centos
See this link on CentOS package management.
http://wiki.centos.org/PackageManagement/Yum
CentOS is redhat based and does not use .deb packages by default. However apt package management has been ported to tons of platforms, you may be able to use a port for centOS
If you use YUM whatever packages you need will be there for your application as redhat distros need all the same things that any other distro does.
EDIT: To get the details out of comments
Packages not available on the target platform either have to be built (possibly as a port) on the target platform and then shipped in the ported package (in this case YUM), or code needs to be modified and forked to use packages which already are available on the target platform. The choice depends on which is worse, or which is even possible given your constraints.

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