On Thu, 23 Sep 2004 10:47:27 -0700, Mark Wheeler wrote: > Yes, I'm sure you are right on all counts, but I'm a glutton for a > little punishment, I guess. :) Trust me when I say I'm still keeping it > in mind. I would just like to understand a bit more about what's going > on under the hood. I like to be creative, but the other side of my > brain likes a little poking, too.
I'm much more afraid of what installing a pre-made "package" will do to my system than I am afraid of trying to compile from source. At least source is confined to its own little messy directory until I'm confident enough to run "make install", and at least by then I've chosen exactly where I want everything to go. As for ImageMagick, it has, by far, the worst "installation instructions" of any piece of Unix-ish software I've used. They're nearly worthless, IMO. The most important thing to remember when trying to install from source is that you must first wrestle with the fleet of poorly-specified, hard-to-find graphics libraries that ImageMagick uses. Only after getting all of those installed and working correctly can you start dealing with ImageMagick itself. And even then, be vigilant and make sure that ImageMagick is actually finding the graphics libs that you installed! It is horrible at this, and will simply continue after failing to find pretty much any graphics library. Watch those lines as they scroll by! Finally, the worst of the worst is "PerlMagick", the CPAN module that uses ImageMagick. It comes with no POD other than a link to the awful, useless web "documentation", and you you will eventually discover that the perl stuff is actually intertwined with the "regular" ImageMagick distribution...which will undoubtedly be a different version than what you're trying to install as part of some random "here's the Perl ImageMagick module!" distribution. In summary, ImageMagick is evil, and building it from source is a pain. But it's *still* better than trusting someone else to do it and then allowing them to spray files all over your disk :) (IMO :) -John
