Hi

I have a couple of questions regarding building applications from source.

Take, for example, the compositor Compton. I recently set up Compton as a replacement for the default compositor in Xfce in the hope that I would get tear-free graphics (which, by the way, is exactly what I got!). Compton said it needed libconfig as a dependency in order to compile.

I initially tried downloading the source for libconfig and compiling/installing as usual, using
However, Compton still wouldn't build, claiming it couldn't find libconfig. However I had just installed it! I ended up downloading a libconfig slackware package (.txz) from the slacky distribution mirrors and installing that with "installpkg", which allowed compton to compile successfully.

This tells me that my Slackware system is not "detecting" source-built applications.

To build Compton, I ran "make" and "make install" (configuration was not necessary), and Compton installed successfully, working perfectly fine. However, I noticed that running "slackpkg clean-system" returned libconfig but not Compton as unneeded packages. This further tells me that when I installed libconfig via a Slackware package it was "detected" by the system, but installing Compton from source left it "ucompton compositorndetected".

Is this behaviour normal? Why was Compton only able to compile when I installed libconfig via a .txz package and not through "make install". And why was Compton not detected as obsolete by slackpkg when libconfig was?

Thanks for any responses,
James

Or, more likely, that the components were installed to the wrong directory. My guess is that the libraries ended up in /lib or /usr/lib rather than (/usr)/lib64.

No distribution "detects" files that are just copied into various directories, which is what happens when you run make install. The package maintenance tools, however, keep track of installed packages and their files in a database.

When you compiled libconfig from source, you used the default settings. The default directory for libraries is usually /usr/lib or /usr/local/lib. However, as you're using a 64-bit distribution, the correct subdirectory for libraries is lib64.

When you built a Compton package using the slackbuild script, two things happened:

1. the slackbuild script ran the ./configure command with the correct --libdir parameter, meaning the library files ended up in a lib64 subdirectory as they should
2. the resulting package could be installed with the package tools, meaning the installation was "recorded" in the package database

As a result, slackpkg "knew" about Compton, but not libconfig. Had you used a slackbuild script to build libconfig and then installed the package, slackpkg would have "seen" both.

The behaviour you've seen is perfectly normal and expected. Problems related to installing from source code can be avoided entirely by using package building scripts (like the slackbuild scripts for Slackware), or if such a script is not available for the software in question, by running ./configure with the appropriate options for your distribution.