How to manually update a program using make?

Question

What is the 'clean way' to manually update a manually installed program on a Debian system?

Let's say I manually installed the version 0.8 of a program doing the ritual tar > ./configure > make > make install. Now I download version 0.9 of the same program. What am I supposed to do? Remove the previous version of the program? Overwrite it?

Answer 1

It entirely depends on how well the makefile is written. check following: Does it provide option like make uninstall if yes then make uninstall. else open the make file. run make clean: it cleans only the compiled binaries from default location (this might be all or this might not be all)

and then check the make install section of the makefile, check where binaries are getting copied, note those locations and delete directly from those paths.

You should be good then.

After uninstalling the program completely you cab re install it. Thats how you can manually update :)

Answer 2

Overwriting will not be probably unsafe (files will be overwritten) but will be inelegant. Try using make uninstall in previous (0.8.0) build directory, then ./configure && make && make install in a new one (0.9.0)