[lug] Binary Distros - Custom Package Feature Selection

Michael J. Hammel mjhammel at graphics-muse.org
Fri Jun 22 08:53:55 MDT 2018


On Fri, 2018-06-22 at 01:17 -0600, Lee Woodworth wrote:
> The web search results I am getting for custom package feature
> selection lead me to believe that binary distros still handle
> feature selection by compiling from source one way or another.
> 
> Is this correct or have I missed something? Note that postfix
> has at least 18 non-documentation features that can be selected
> at build time. So distro-provided package-variations with different
> feature sets is not usually a solution for what I want to do.

Well, yeah.  The only alternative to compiling from source for custom
feature selection would be if a binary had loadable modules.  Most
don't.  GIMP is an example of one that does.

If you need special features you can do a couple of things.
1. Download the src package from the distro and modify to suit your
needs.
2. Download the project source code and compile to suit your needs.

The latter is generally easier unless a package has special patches for
the distro (say to change locations of required dependencies or
something).  If having the binary in package format is necessary you
can always wrap the build artifacts with a shell script to generate the
package.  I do this with RPM and OPKG packages.  This technique works
best with source code that supports autoconf so you can override the
install directory, allowing you to install to a local directory and use
that for generating packages.

-- 
Michael J. Hammel
mjhammel at graphics-muse.org
michaelhammel at acm.org



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