ronny.haryan.to

Occasionally there are some applications that I’d like to install or try that are not in Ubuntu repositories, and there are no deb packages available, so I have to resort to compiling from source. That’s fine. I just don’t like not being able to easily uninstall them like when I installed using a package management tool (e.g. dpkg). I know some apps provide ‘uninstall’ rule in the Makefile, but it still doesn’t feel right to me.

When I was still using Gentoo, most of the times I could easily write a simple ebuild and put it in my local portage tree overlay, so that I could emerge it (and unmerge it later if I want to).

Not that easy in Debian or Ubuntu. Or, so I thought, until I found checkinstall. It’s available in Ubuntu’s universe repository. So I just do ./configure && make as usual, then instead of running sudo make install, I just do sudo checkinstall -D, answer a few questions, and I’d get a deb package that I can install with dpkg -i. Sweet. checkinstall can also create a Slackware package and an RPM package, by the way.

Note: the website seems to be down at the time of writing. Here’s a cached version.