Re: [gentoo-user] [OT] build programs in other distros

[Alan McKinnon]

On 28/07/2017 23:07, Francisco Ares wrote:
> Hi, All.
>
> I've used a few distros, but mostly for curiosity. Being a Gentoo user
> for ... well, more than a decade, I'm used to build binaries in a very
> simple way, that simply works for me.
>
> So, I probably learned the way to do it using Gentoo, and nothing else.

Gentoo is a distro that has to have a compiler, or at least the build
host does. So it's hugely different from say Ubuntu where compiling is
discouraged

> Recently I tried to build one of my programs in an Ubuntu distro, and it
> didn't build at all, messing library and include files names and locations.

Did you have the matching -devel packages installed? They give headers
and such, compiling never works without them.

>
> How do real developers manage this? And why this difference happens, in
> the first place?  Why mangle uper/lower case characters in library file
> names?

You are going to have to supply facts to get an answer, otherwise you
are just venting and giving other people a chance to also vent.

Names of things are just names of things and upstream projects seldom
know about how every other project names things. File name collisions
are common. So distro maintainers often enforce naming conventions to
try avoid this problem and it often works out well. But, to compile
anything on that distro you have to know how the distro works and what
the policies are. No way around that one, so go search for developer
guidelines for Debian and start reading.

> I guess that's why "autoconf" "configure" et al exists...  But never
> tried to learn about them, so perhaps it's time now?

No, that's not what those tools are for.


-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@×××××.com