Mark Eichin <eichin@cygnus.com> writes: > Clever -- but an amazing kludge :-) Remember that it's ok for this to > be hackish for "installing debian packages in user space" because > that's simply a *rare* operation -- the whole point of debian packages > is that they fit cleanly into a debian system. However, I'd suggest > that *most* of the times that a source package is installed at all, it > will be installed in user space -- either by a user patching or just > being curious about a particular package, or by a developer doing the > next release. We may disagree on this, but I think it is more an > issue of "knowing the customer" than of philosophy. OK - I have definitely gotten the message that dpkg is "hands off" when it comes to using for purposes other than what it was originally intended for. For my planned projects, I will look elsewhere for a facility which does the same basic thing as dpkg - with the key difference being that discussing "perverted" uses of it can happen in a more rational, open-minded environment. > It seems from your comments that you haven't walked through the > complexity of building one of your src.deb packages -- say, from new > upstream sources. I do that often enough that I'd find it useful to > have a dpkg-source --upgrade: something that takes an a .dsc and > applies it to the "wrong" source tar file (probably explicitly listed > on the command line.) It could be clever in a number of ways (though > that sounds more like a deb-make style heuristic) or it could just run > patch and let you know where it failed. (On the other hand, for some > packages I often just try again with the pristine upstream sources > *first* just to see if the debian patches are still needed...) Again, with the proposed system, this is easy - just install an upgraded src-orig-*.deb file. I'm going to give this a rest. It has been quite an informative experience (although not quite what I expected). Cheers, - Jim
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