Re: Tutorial #2: using dpkg in user space
>Using dpkg this way is great for my proposed source packages, but it is
>also useful for any Debian package you might want to install in
>user space only.
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.
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...)
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