Re: Updating without Apt

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.

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