[Techtalk] I want to recompile a debian package installed with apt, possible?

[Colleen Hatfield]

On Thu, 28 Oct 2004 19:50:41 -0400, aec <brat at magma.ca> wrote:
> It sure did :) thanks a lot Collen, it worked out really nicely and
> has now introduced me to yet another Debian "trick".

Yay Angelina!

On the subject of cool Debian things, a tool I've recently
familiarized myself with is "debootstrap".  It's a very easy way of
installing a Debian base-system into a directory on your existing
Linux install.  I sort of randomly ran across it while installing
Sarge on my Cobalt Raq 4i, because I needed to set up an NFSroot
environment for the Raq 4i to use during the initial install.  I used
it last night to set up an NFSroot for this Javastation that I'm
trying to get running (now if I can only get the kernel right, lol). 
It can also be used to run multiple versions of Debian on top of each
other: you  could have a Sid machine, but use debootstrap to install a
Woody base system on it, then chroot to the Woody environment and test
your stuff on Woody (I understand that Debian developers use it this
way).

One gotcha I experienced was that you can't currently use it to
install a base system for another architecture.  I initially tried to
install an i386 base system on my sparc64 NFS server, but it didn't
work because during the debootstrap process it chroots to the target
directory and attempts to use some of the binary packages that it put
there.

It's probably old-hat to some of you Debian goddesses, but I just
discovered it recently and found it exciting so I thought I'd share
;-).

- Colleen