Good practices when installing from sources on Linux

Question

I'm wondering what are good practices about compilation and manual installation of software on Linux systems. I mean getting, building and installing code by this usual way :

git clone https://a-repo/foo.git
cd foo/
./configure
make
make install

• Should that be avoided ? Or is it recommended ? Maybe it is better to make a package for the distribution in use ?
• Are there some tricks to manage versions and updates ?
• Does good practices exists when doing ./configure, particularly with --prefix= ?
• How can I install / uninstall properly ? Should I always keep the sources to do make uninstall ?
• I have seen some tools like stow, but this seems to be a controversial solution... Maybe an other one ?

I prefer solutions that are independents of distro, but all suggestions and advices are welcome !
Thank you !

EDIT: It seems that people don't understand my question. I'm not opening a debate, I just want an answer as clear as possible for the various points above. I really think this could be helpful for some people. Thank you for your contribution.

• Artem S. Tashkinov: TLDR Use --prefix=/opt/something or even --prefix=/opt/something-VERSION. No issues with deinstalling, installing, keeping track of versions, etc. Don't wanna write an answer - there's just too much to talk about.
• ramius: Thanks for this advice. I know there is a lot to say about, I would just like to have an overview and different opinions on this topic ;-)
• larsks: This question isn't really suitable for a stackexchange site: the answers are going to be a matter of discussion and opinion. There are probably some reddits that would be a good fit. But as long as I'm here, I really like stow for managing source-installed software.
• ramius: Thank you for your tips, I didn't think about Reddit. I'm looking for a kind of checklist, so I tought that SE was good for that... I'll try a bit more stow, I like the concept of this minimalistic software. The problems I encountered with stow were about some symlinks not working, mainly for systemd services.
• Sotto Voce: Three words: document, Document, DOCUMENT. When I was a telephone support tech for a company with Unix/Linux products, I spoke with many, many engineers who joined a company and had to puzzle out the software and configs left behind by a previous engineer. Among those were programs installed from source rather than from the package manager. Write down in a wiki or Google Docs the general steps you use to build your programs and where you install them. The engineer you help with this will even be you -- in a year when you need to update things and can't remember the details.

Answer 1

The problem with your method is figuring out what files have to be deleted when you want to uninstall the software.

The best practice is to build a package for the distribution. This has several advantages. It allows you to easily install, upgrade, & remove packages. It allows you to compile the software on a seperate machine avoiding putting compilers on every machine. It allows you to easily upgrade the package when the upstream goes to another version/release. And, it allows you to build the software without being root.

A quick & dirty work around I used before I learned how to use rpmbuild & spec files was to:

./configure
make
make DESTDIR=/tmp/build install

This puts all the "installed" files with the correct installation tree under the /tmp/build directory. Then change the owner/group for all the files in the directory. Then:

tar cvfj <filename> -C /tmp/build/

To install them: tar xvf <filename> -C / To uninstall them: tar tf <filename> | xargs rm

• ramius: Thanks for this tip, I think this is something like that I want ! I tried this bash tar cvjf ed.tar.bz2 -C /tmp/build/ tar: Cowardly refusing to create an empty archive Try 'tar --help' or 'tar --usage' for more information.` But I got this error as you can see. So tried tar cvjf ed.tar.bz2 -C /tmp/build/ ., but this creates a problem when uninstalling: bash rm: impossible de supprimer './usr/local/': Aucun fichier ou dossier de ce type
• ramius: I did this but it is a little dirty ;-) tar tf ed.tar.bz2 | sed -e 's/^.//' | xargs rm
• Garnet: @thiblcr Whatever works. However, if you are going to be doing a lot of these, you should take the time to learn how to build packages. Another resource is "pkgs.org". Someone may have already built the package for your distro.
• ramius: Yeah thank you very much, your solution is very simple, I 'll keep this trick... I'm mainly on Gentoo, so I'll need to learn how to write ebuilds. I think you're right about building packages, this seems to be the better way !