Re: Embedding one .deb inside another

[Tim Retout <tim@retout.co.uk>]

On Thu, 2009-11-26 at 12:59 -0800, Joe Smith wrote:
> Is this something that's fundamentally impossible or is there some way
> to achieve what I need? 

I believe this is fundamentally impossible given your description of the
constraints; as you've discovered, dpkg will take out a lock on its
status files, so the only way is to pass both packages on the command
line (possibly using apt). dpkg has no dependency resolution of its own.

You could pass --admindir in the invocation in the preinst to get dpkg
to temporarily look at a different copy of its files; then merge back
the changes outside of dpkg without respecting the locks somehow; but
this would be a very silly thing to do, and probably still
impossible. :)

-- 
Tim Retout <tim@retout.co.uk>