On Sat, 7 Aug 1999, Nathan Raymond wrote:

> >So, uh, why not try to build the package?
> 
> I've only installed pre-compiled packages, I really should look into 
> how to build packages myself.  If I want to customize the 
> configuration of something like xemacs, can I still do that if I'm 
> using packages or will I have to use someone else's config?

Sure. You can run "make configure", then descend into the build
directory and run "./configure --help" and "./configure --whatever".
Configure uses the cached results from the first pass for most of the
OS specific stuff. This is usually not a problem, but for fancy stuff
you can "rm config.cache" before re-running configure. Finally, back
out to the top and "make" or "make install".

If you have tweaked an Imakefile, you back out, "rm work/.configure_done",
and the package engine will be "tricked" into running imake (again).

There's also a facility for using local patches of the form
patches/patch-local-*. These are simply not checksummed.