Quote:
Originally Posted by seanos
I don’t consider building from source itself to be particularly difficult. A bit tedious, yes. It’s providing useful, coherent instructions that’s the hard part and I think you did that very well for the most part.
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As a general rule of thumb, the dedicated nerds have already done the job of packaging most useful software.
People who want to build from source anyway, should have a basic knowledge of the pitfalls and be able to figure out how to resolve likely errors. For instance, matching python modules to pip/apt.
As you say, useful instructions are difficult. The best way is by example -- for instance, maintaining a packaging script (or just looking at the one the various distros have used to package the software).
Granted, I have never been able to figure out how debian's build system works
but I have always found Arch Linux quite simple and easy to understand in that respect. (In fact, I maintain the Arch User Repository package for
sigil-git).
Debian also has that terrible habit of splitting development headers from packages, making it much harder to resolve build dependencies.
For instance, your issue with building Pillow is because of split development and end-user packages.
IMHO Debian is not the best distro for building things from source.