Re: dependencies

[cjw44@flatline.org.uk (Colin Watson)]

"Joshua Haberman" <coughdropaddict@hotmail.com> wrote:
>I'm trying to make a deb for an X program. What I'd like to do is make two 
>version of the deb: one for people running unstable (already did this 
>successfully) and one that people running stable can use. I can't figure out 
>how to do the latter: I can't figure out how not to make the package depend 
>on version 4 of the X libraries. Is this possible?

Yes, at least the latter part of your question. Add a
debian/shlibs.local file to your package that points the appropriate
libraries at xlib6g rather than xlibs. Section 12.2.5 of the packaging
manual has more details.

However, you'll probably end up depending on glibc2.2 anyway. The best
way to do this sort of thing is to create yourself a potato chroot,
since X packages built on potato will work on woody/sid. The steps are
something like this:

  * Grab base2_2.tgz from the appropriate disks-$ARCH tree in the potato
    archive.
  * Untar it somewhere, say /potato.
  * chroot /potato
  * In the chroot, edit /etc/hosts, /etc/resolv.conf, and
    /etc/apt/sources.list as appropriate for your machine.
  * dpkg --configure -a (can't remember if this is necessary, but it
    does no harm).
  * Update, then install the build-essential packages.

That done, you can tar this up and put it somewhere; whenever you need
to compile a package for stable, untar it again, install whatever's in
the Build-Depends: line (this also serves as a handy build-dependency
checker), copy the package into the chroot, and dpkg-buildpackage as
usual.

-- 
Colin Watson                                     [cjw44@flatline.org.uk]