Re: Updating without Apt

William Pursell wrote:
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.


I was going to to a configure --prefix=/usr/local as you suggested, but I made the mistake of looking through the configure file and seeing that perhaps exec_prefix was the variable I wanted to change. I then figured that hey, this is what people do for all the other packages, it's likely to work for emacs, and gave it a shot with prefix.

It's worked beautifully! Installation went flawlessly, and now I'll just install slime and a few other things and get runnin'. Thanks so much Will!

Andrew Gray
Seattle,WA


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