From: bob@... (Bob Proulx)
Date: 2007-09-11T15:27:18+09:00
Subject: Re: What Linux distribution to choose for learning Ruby and Ruby on Rails

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> Chad Perrin wrote:
> > Much as I prefer Debian over Gentoo, I don't know that I'd say you could
> > rebuild packages from source for performance as easily on Debian as
> > Gentoo.  Maybe it's close enough, though.
> 
> It's a couple extra lines in the config file for apt-get to point to the
> source package repositories (".dsc", I think they are). Then there is
> another command, the Debian equivalent of "rpmbuild", that compiles the
> source package to a binary one (.deb). At that point you install the
> .deb and you're done.

Ensure that all of the build dependencies are installed and available,
needed once only:

  sudo apt-get build-dep SOMEPACKAGE

Rebuilding is then pretty much as easy as this:

  fakeroot apt-get source --build SOMEPACKAGE

> I think there's a one-step command that will do the compile and
> install and throw away the intermediate stuff too.

The apt-src package is designed to manage everything and make this
even easier.  See http://packages.debian.org/sid/apt-src .

Bob