Installing from source: helpful tools? and a few questions

Question

a newbie here.

There are some tools that you want to install from source but you do not know which libraries are needed because it is not mentioned in the Read-file. Installing from source bugs me sometimes because you are trying to configure everything but there are always libraries missing.

1. Is there a tool or a way how to figure out which libraries are needed to be installed before ./configure?

Another issue I have encountered is the difference of package and library names between different distros. If you are on a fedora system the libraries are named different than on a debian system. Also sometimes the required library is packed in a whole different package than on other distros.

2. Is there a tool or something like a chart in which you can see e.g. how Debian packages/libraries are called in fedora?
3. Generally speaking in which case do you install a devel package and in which the "usual" one?

Answer 1

1. None that I'm aware of. Most of the error messages spewed by configure scripts are easy to understand and act upon. When I don't understand what it's complaining about (happened maybe once or twice during my entire life) I google it up.

2. Again, none that I'm aware of. You can use rpm -qf /path/file in Fedora and dpkg-query -S /path/file in deb based distros to find the package a particular library or file belongs to.

3. Normally you don't install any packages unless something depends on them (and in most distros it happens automatically once you try to install/update something). If a configure script complains about something you always install a development version of the required package, because only the devel package contains development headers, and an unversioned .so library which you can link against.