The best package manager for me

[Compintuit]

Hello all, as you know, when software does not have a package build, one must install from source. After that, the package is invisible to the package manager. I really know of no standard way of uninstalling software compiled without a package. So I'm asking if anyone knows of, or if it could even be built, a package manager that would install and manage tarballs I download, as well as packages from repositories.

And if software to do so does not exist, what is the easiest package format to use - I may write some packages for tarballs I find on the net.

As a side note, is there any other package system that uses something like use flags? I think they're awesomely efficient.

[GNU-Fan]

Maybe you want to move to Gentoo, which satisfies your two wishes.
I don't know what the package its called there. Emerge?

Judging from the sheer number of packages and maintainers, I would say it can't be too hard to do .deb packages. I've never tried myself though.

[Cabhan]

Gentoo USE flags basically correspond to preprocessor symbols for the code, that allows the code to compile differently. They work in Gentoo because Gentoo is source-based: for a binary package, you obviously cannot change the way the package was compiled.

If you install a package from source, there might be an "uninstall" target for the Makefile, which will remove the package. Otherwise, you can always check the "install" target to see what files it created, and delete them manually.

As far as creating a distro package from a source package, Debian seems to be the popular one these days. There are a number of documents on how to do it, and the Debian community has produced several tools to help you with the process. This is the guide that I used when I created my first Debian package:
Debian New Maintainers' Guide

I am sure that other distros have similar documents to help you.

[Touchtecservers]

I am sure there was a "chkpackage" script or something that took a snapshot of your system before and after, and stored the "diffs" for source.

Besides, gentoo is so easy to use and add in packages to, its worth just using.

[reed9]

There's always checkinstall, which replaces make install.

CheckInstall Homepage

And as usual, I have throw out the Arch Linux suggestion. Their PKGBUILD scripts are, in my opinion, simpler and more elegant that Gentoo's Ebuilds or Slackware's slack build scripts.

[Compintuit]

But so there is no way to manage installed tarballs with a package manager?

[Jonathan183]

But so there is no way to manage installed tarballs with a package manager?

You will struggle to manage installed tarballs ... you can manage tarballs that you want to install.

[reed9]

But so there is no way to manage installed tarballs with a package manager?

I'm not sure I understand the question. We just gave you a way - checkinstall. Or, use a distro like Arch or Gentoo with ports like systems. Though with those two distros, you potentially need to actually create the ebuild or pkgbuild script yourself, although, at least in the case of Arch (don't use Gentoo so I couldn't say), there has yet to be a program I've wanted that isn't either in the repos or have a pkgbuild available from the community.

[meton_magis]

The one thing that gives the most deffinition to a distro is its package manager. Asking to change your package manager USUALY means changing distros. If you are unsatisfied with the answers given to you so far (gentoo was the most suggested, and it the distro I'm using myself ) then your not going to find much help due to how tightly integrated a package manager is with a distro.

The easiest way (in my opinion) of how to seperate a package to make it easy to uninstall, would to add to your configure statement a prefix

./configure --prefix /usr/local/package-name (it may be --prefix=/usr*****, dont recall)

then do
ln -s /usr/local/package-name/bin/execution-file /usr/local/bin

Then when you need to uninstall the app, just remove /usr/local/package-name

and /usr/local/bin/execution-file

[Dapper Dan]

As long as we're talking about source based, I have to mention CRUX. The CRUX ports system keeps track of all that for you. You have "yapo" which will not only tell you what is installed and what isn't, but will give a complete list of package dependencies and other info before you do the install. Once your ports are set up, you do:

prt-get depinst package_you_want_installed

Done.