[Techtalk] package hell: Related .deb question

Figaro ynegorp at charter.net
Wed May 7 15:10:39 UTC 2008


I have a series of programs that occasionally need to be updated (cad
and structural-sim softwares). Obviously they are locally installed,
they are either .deb or .deb that I build from .rpm's using the alien
program.
What I would love to be able to do would be add them to the apt-cache
list somehow for simple package update.
At present I only know how to use dpkg -i /some/dir/my/super.i386.deb to
install them. Which always wipes out the license files and often causes
much grief for me with the IT group and vendors to get new license codes
  (assuming one can convince both "IT" and the vendor my story is valid).
Anyway, does anyone here have an idea how to easily do this?
Thank you,
matthew

Elwing wrote:
> On May 7, 2008, at 1:55 AM, Maria McKinley wrote:
>> Since there is no actual xemacs in lenny (debian testing), I tried to
>> compile xemacs myself, and have now have a half-working xemacs. I  
>> would
>> like to uninstall the package, but I'm really not sure how to do this.
>> The xemacs site claims that there is a pkginfo/MANIFEST.pkgname file
>> that has a list of all of the files, but I don't have that. I think  
>> that
>> must be for pre-compiled packages. Assuming that I get it removed, I
>> would also like to know the best way to deal with the lack of xemacs.
>> I'm getting the feeling that I should edit sources.list to allow  
>> stable
>> packages, and download xemacs from stable, but I am a little nervous
>> about having both enabled. How does the package manager know which
>> distribution to get which files from?
> 
> 
> How to get rid of xemacs, I can't really help you with, but there used  
> to be a script that you could call with make install that would record  
> all of the files that were installed (and I can't find it on Google to  
> save my life).  You might also want to check if there's a debian  
> directory, and you can create a .deb file from the source you have and  
> install that.
> 
> You want to do something called "Apt-Pinning" [1].  You list both  
> sources in your sources.list file.  By default, apt-get will pull out  
> the highest version available (in your case testing), but if it's not  
> in testing, it'll pull from stable.  You can also force a package to  
> install form a specific distribution by using apt-get -t
> ex:
> apt-get -t stable install xemacs
> 
> Elwing
> 
> [1] http://jaqque.sbih.org/kplug/apt-pinning.html (although you don't  
> need to edit /etc/apt/preferences unless you want stable to be the  
> priority)
> 
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