Understanding prevu

So I finished building soundtouch which I am hoping will be the last necessary build dependency before I am able to build to build Ardour. Therefore I will test the how prevu handles newly build packages.

prevu can set up the newly build .deb files as a local apt repository. This is important if you want to install newly built .dep files for updated applications.

But also this is rather important (I believe) when you want to build an application which has a dependency which needs to be built first. Let's say you want to build an application called bar that has a dependency called foo.

Therefore, you need to build foo (the dependency) first, update prevu next and then build bar (the application you want). It appears that foo (the dependency) does not need to actually be installed (via synaptic or apt-get install), simply updating prevu will make the dependency (foo) available to prevu.

I tested this after building soundtouch when compiling Ardour. It was unnecessary to actually install soundtouch (via synaptic or apt-get install) in order to compile Ardour. Updating prevu after building soundtouch was enough to build Ardour.

prevu

prevu is an extremely handy tool for backporting and I am hoping to use it extensively in my efforts.

The first thing I did was to clean a 30 gig partition of my drive and install Ubuntu Studio 8.04 and install all the updates.

Next I installed prevu with:

sudo apt-get install prevu

The next step was to add the source repository from Juanty. This is important because prevu will build the most current available version of your application through this repository. Therefore, I opened my /etc/apt/sources.list by typing:

sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

and added the following to the bottom:

# Adding jaunty sources for prevu
deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu jaunty main restricted universe multiverse

This allows you (and more importantly prevu) to download the source packages from the main, restricted, universe, and multiverse repositories for jaunty.

Next I needed to initialize prevu by typing:

sudo -E prevu-init

Wait a while while it does its thing. Then it will ask if you want to add the .deb's you create as a repository. I answered yes.

This will allow you to either apt-get install or use synaptic to install the newer version applications into your older (but very stable) LTS version of Ubuntu Studio. And remove them also when necessary with apt-get or synaptic.

That's it for installing and initializing prevu. Next I'm going to document building libffado.