Going upstream

Going upstream

Posted Feb 9, 2008 2:00 UTC (Sat) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)
In reply to: Partially distributed distributions by JLCdjinn
Parent article: LCA: Disintermediating distributions

For relatively simple, self-contained programs that you invoke from a terminal, it's not hard to experiment with upstream versions. The key point is that the familiar (at least to developers) configure, make, make install sequence installs programs into /usr/local by default, which is an area that distros don't touch. Alternatively, you can built it in a special place, to make it easy to blow away whenever your distro fixes the problem.

So, if you want the upstream vim, download the source tarball, and do

tar jxf vim-7.1.tar.bz2
cd vim71
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/vim71
make
sudo make install

You now have built the upstream vim and installed it in /usr/local/vim71/bin, without disturbing your distro's vim.

(You will of course need to have the appropriate development tools installed).

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