(First things first: I have never used nor installed hulahop, what follows is generic, based on glancing over the source tree.)
To get this straight, there are basically two ways to install something in a Debian(-derived) distribution:
- the clean way: via a
.deb package and some tool like apt-get, aptitude, dpkg, you can build them yourself or semi-self by using tools like checkinstall (for example, there are probably others); this enables you to use your distribution's tools to remove them and you're thus save from cluttering up your system, what is the danger of...
- the manual way, i.e., using whatever is provided in the sources to compile and install it yourself. The important part is choosing where to install it to, usually called "prefix". (A prefix of
/usr/local or $HOME or $HOME/.local can be used to separate manually installed packages from the distribution's packages.*)
So, given you chose (2.), you have to look at the cloned sources, where you'll find:
autogen.sh, a three-line shell script that calls autoreconf, part of the GNU build system, which if run successfully (i.e., you have the necessary build tools, e.g. autotools or build-essenstial packages, not sure about these) creates a configure script. The autogen.sh script then calls ./configure "$@", i.e., it creates a Makefile tailored to your system that is used to compile the sources, in the classical ./configure && make && make install way). If you want to change the prefix, pass --prefix=/the/prefix/you/want to configure (or to autogen.sh since it passes the argument to configure, via $@) -- this is the manual way- a
debian/ folder, that contains what is needed to create a .deb package -- the clean way!
When you find this in sources, it can be worthwhile to check if someone already built a deb package, since it's strong evidence for this. Googling "hulahop debian" reveals a Debian package and an Ubuntu package sugar-hulahop. You could use these or if you still prefer to install the newest sources, you could try (again) what was told you here and ask a question including a specific error if it fails.
(* If you chose a prefix, be sure to tell every involved party, i.e., adjust $PATH if you want your shell to know where to find an executable, do whatever is needed for python to know where to import something from, etc.)
