Suckless is one of the best and most popular non-GNU software projects for Linux & Unix like operating systems. They have made some of the fastest and best apps available right now, such as dwm, st, dmenu, and surf. While the software is useful, it can be a little hard to install properly, as it requires building from source. But no worries, I am here to show you how to correctly obtain all of the dependencies, get the code, and build it.
Lets set aside my personal belief that suckless is a satire that too many people started to take seriously…
Always using the latest git version as done in the article doesn’t strike me as the most sane thing to do if you “just” want to use the software especially as suckless offers version tarballs.
But suggesting sudo make clean install to build is really not okay…(and also not how the suckless tools I checked suggest it). You cloned (or better extracted the tarballs) as user…there is not a single reason to build the software as root. If you have to install then do it in two steps, build as user and only “make install” as root.
If you really like routinely building core packages in your system from source, use Gentoo. It’s a distro made for building everything from source, so is one of the best set up for the risks that entails.
But I think there are reasons why someone would want to build suckless tools manually…namely that their configuration is mostly done in the source-code (Damn, it’s so hard to not write anything too opinionated about suckless but I really try my best). But even then I agree with your other post that it’s far better to use the distro facilities for building the the distro source packages just with your own patches applied.
Lets set aside my personal belief that suckless is a satire that too many people started to take seriously…
Always using the latest git version as done in the article doesn’t strike me as the most sane thing to do if you “just” want to use the software especially as suckless offers version tarballs.
But suggesting
sudo make clean installto build is really not okay…(and also not how the suckless tools I checked suggest it). You cloned (or better extracted the tarballs) as user…there is not a single reason to build the software as root. If you have to install then do it in two steps, build as user and only “make install” as root.If you really like routinely building core packages in your system from source, use Gentoo. It’s a distro made for building everything from source, so is one of the best set up for the risks that entails.
As gentoo user I can’t argue with that… ;)
But I think there are reasons why someone would want to build suckless tools manually…namely that their configuration is mostly done in the source-code (Damn, it’s so hard to not write anything too opinionated about suckless but I really try my best). But even then I agree with your other post that it’s far better to use the distro facilities for building the the distro source packages just with your own patches applied.
Ha. Pipe some random URLs to a root shell while you’re at it. /c/whatcouldgowrong