Question about Compiling from Source
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If a piece of software is not present in my repository, and then I instead compile it from source-code, how would I go about dealing with updates for the software? Do I need to manually re-compile it every time there is an update?
Short answer:
Yes.
Long answer:
In many cases such software happens to be packaged by some third party. If that third party makes the packages available through some repository, you can point your package manager to that repository and software would be updated from there a standard way.
In case of Trisquel and other distros from Debian family, those are called PPA repositories.
It's worth mentioning, that You should only add additional repositories to Your system if You fully trust the third party, that maintains them. Otherwise, someone could easily infect your computer through a PPA repo.
Also, there might be many reasons why software is available in a third party repo and not in Your distro's one. For example:
* It's not popular enough
* It doesn't fit distro's policies (yes, You have to be carefult with PPAs if You want to avoid nonfre stuff)
* It's too new to be in an LTS distro or it's developing so rapidly, that You want a newer version than in Your distro
* It's difficult to package correctly according to distro's packaging guidelines (e.g. due to many deps, that also need packaging or because of bundled deps)
As You can see, there are some pitfalls with third party repos, yet using one doesn't have to mean something bad.
Many ppl here use Jxself's Linux-libre repo[1] for kernels.
In case You decide to compile the program from source, it's good to make sure You're able to uninstall it afterwards. If the program itself doesn't provide an easy way to do that, then You might want to make it into a package for Your distro's package manager. Even a quick and dirty package would do for that purpose.
*thumbs up*
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