More of the same.
26-Jun-08
I went to grab autotools so I could play in the source tree of a rather popular open source project. From their “Write Code” page:
Building is straight forward and familiar if you’ve ever built software on Linux before. We use the standard autotools suite for our build environment.
“So hey, I’ll go just apt-get install autotools! That’ll work!”
<chris@zwei> ~$ sudo apt-get install autotools
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
E: Couldn't find package autotools
“That’s not great. However, I can just open up Synaptic and search for “autotools”, and it’ll point me at the packages I want!”
Searching brings up autotools-dev, and a few other packages, which aren’t what I want. Crap.
*google*
Oh, so I need libtool, automake, and autoconf to install Autotools?
*install*
Oh, look, I still need intltoolize. I bet Synaptic can find the package name if I search for that!
No?
Okay, I’ll try running intltoolize in a shell and the magic stuff ubuntu has will find it for me!
$ intltoolize
The program 'intltoolize' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing:
sudo apt-get install intltool
bash: intltoolize: command not found
Amazing!
Of course I have something called intltool-debian installed, but that’s obviously useless for what I want to do. I’ll install intltool.
Hey, it actually runs now! Not entirely, as there’s still some autoconf voodoo I need to deal with.
Conclusions:
- Synaptic is both useless, in that it can’t find what package an executable name is in, and annoying, because it grabs the dpkg lock the second it starts up so I can’t search with it and use apt-get to actually install things. This wouldn’t be a problem if Synaptic didn’t clear my search results every single time I install something.
- Ubuntu’s package repositories are both comprehensive and uselessly grouped around the smallest packages imaginable. This makes task-oriented software installation much harder than it should be.
- Whatever magic powers my shell telling me what package to install in order to get an app I don’t have when I try and run it is way more useful than Synaptic ever was.
- Autotools might just be evil.
- This needs to be much clearer and easier than it is now.
