Building a package from source

Building from source is an activity that is less and less needed on a day-by-day basis. Most of the distributions are already providing the most necessary packages for any task. The days of building applications from source are long gone. Repositories provide tens of thousands of packages that you can easily install.

The two scenarios where you would have to build from source would be: (1) if you need a legacy app that is no longer maintained and delivered with your current distribution; and (2) when you need to use an application developed in-house. If those scenarios apply, you will probably need to build from source.

Compiling a source package would require you to have proper development tools installed on your system. In the following example, we will use a simple script written in bash that shows the IP and network interface to the standard output. This would be our application developed in-house. Please keep in mind that the following is only...