[lug] Building from Source on Debian

[Jed S. Baer]

Hi Folks.

Okay, I'm being a little lazy here - I can do some web research and find
all this out. Well, maybe there are some tips/hints/kinks, and highly
recommended web guides someone could point me at.

Problem is, I made what turned out to be an ill-fated decision to go with
Mint/Debian, thinking that a rolling-release distro would be a good
thing. Well, apart from the fact that they aren't doing updates, I'm
discovering various other problems. Don't need to go into details, just
that I'm finding things I need to have be different.

Current issue is that Audacity is compiled without ffmpeg support. Bleh.

So, until I decide what other distro to switch to, I'm going to take the
plunge and run a Frankenstein system with things built from source. I
used to do this, waaaay waaaay back, in RH and/or Fedora. For example, I
was building Gnome from nightly CVS.

I know I'll need -dev versions of all the libraries, build environment,
etc.

I'm thinking I should be able to get the -src packages, cd to where they
unpack, and use the usual make incantations. Probably should --prefix
to /usr/local so I don't create any odd conflicts, though I also think
that as long as I'm pulling from the repositories for my distro, I
shouldn't have any trouble with putting things where they'd end up
installing from binary packages.

Will there be any advantage to going the extra mile to make my own .deb
packages? I know that should I ever want to remove the software, that'll
make it easier. But I don't see that as something I'll be wanting to do,
since the packages I want to build are things I use frequently.

TIA
jed