install of mc 4.6.0 from source on Debian Woody (stable)

[hugo vanwoerkom <hugovanwoerkom yahoo com>]

This apparently is common knowledge, but just in case
there are others that are is ignorant as I: in order
to install mc 4.6.0 on a Debian Woody (stable) system
I had to resort to the following (hoping it won't
backfire later...):

Because the .deb file of mc 4.6.0 relies on a version
of libc that is not installed on Woody, I installed
from the tarball of mc 4.6.0
1. ./configure won't find libgpm until you tarball
install gpm also in order to get libgpm.a
2. So download gpm from
http://ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/system/mouse/gpm
and configure, make and make install.

The nice thing is that all this new stuff is in
/usr/local/ where Debian does NOT install its stuff,
so Debian can still do its tricks and you get the
stuff from /local by merely changing the PATH env var.

3. You have to set /etc/profile with the mc -P trick
as recorded in mc-wrapper.sh in
/usr/local/share/mc/bin. The trick as per mc 4.5.55
didn't work for me anymore.

4. Then you have to point gpm to the new gpm that you
installed in /usr/local/sbin/gpm, so change the
appropriate variable in /etc/init.d/gpm

I believe this leaves Debian free to pursue its ends
and gives me mc 4.6.0. I would rarely do this but mc
is such a central piece of the system that it proves
necessary, yet for me it is not worth it to change my
Debian sources to unstable (what is that called now?
Sarge or Slink?) which DOES have 4.6.0

Thanks.
Hugo


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