lukew made a good point on the end of the Compile-VICE howto. I originally had configure-make-sudo make install as the procedure, but looking back on it two months later, it really should use checkinstall.
If something goes wrong, it’s a lot easier to clean up after checkinstall. And if somebody doesn’t like it or wants to uninstall it, it’s easier to dpkg -r that deb than to weasel out of a sudo make install.
I’ll touch up the howto, and make it a little more user-friendly, instead of just hoping to be newb-friendly.
Another good solution (that I prefer for software I compile by myself) is to use stow. You have to configure the package with –prefix=/usr/local, then install the package to a temporary location (e.g. by ‘make install DESTDIR=/tmp/foo) and then move its contents to a dedicated directory (e.g. /usr/local/stow/packagename). The you do ‘cd /usr/local/stow; stow packagename’; stow maintains symlinks in /usr/local and allows you to easily remove packages with ‘stow -D packagename’.
Thanks, Pawel. I’ll look into that one and see if it’s better. Cheers!