What's changed: Initial version (topic 2.04, subtopics 2.04.1–2.04.6)
4.1Building and Installing from Source with make
Learn the full workflow for building software from source instead of relying on package managers: fetching source with git clone, git tag -l, and git checkout; extracting with gzip/gunzip/bzip2/xz/tar/unzip; applying diffs with patch; detecting the environment with configure; and building/installing with make and make install.
Software not yet packaged by your distribution, or software you need to build with custom options, must be built from source by hand. For an operations engineer, mastering the whole sequence—fetching source, verifying it, and deploying it—is foundational professional knowledge.
4.1.1Fetching source and choosing a version
- git clone fetches the whole repository. To use a stable release, list tags with git tag -l and switch to a specific one with git checkout <tag>.
- Archives downloaded from a distribution site are extracted according to their compression: gzip/gunzip (.gz), bzip2 (.bz2), xz (.xz), tar (bundle extraction, e.g.
tar xzf), and unzip (.zip). - Vendor-supplied patch files are applied with patch (
patch -p1 < fix.patch), normally right after extracting the source and before running configure.
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