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Re: Packages



>This is one of the things that at first put me off of debian: the
>necessity of having packages in some arbitrary format.  With
>Slackware, I was actually pleased to learn that the tar file format is
>a standard on Unix archives, and I readily learned to import any other
>software or source code I might find, not to mention that I didn't
>need to have "pkgtool" to install it on my debian system.   The
>"pkgtool" utility wouldn't log, of course, such non-Slackware packages. 

There is no such necessity.  You are free to install the "tar" files
to your heart's content.  You just can't expect the package handling
tool to manage them, is all.

If you want to install non-packaged software, though, you really should
install it in "local" so it doesn't conflict with Debian packages.

>A possible suggestion would be to have some kind of procedure to log in
>packages that are not in the .deb format, say a tared packaged like
>Slackware's.  I have just installed emacs 19.30 from slackware, which
>seems ok, but I will have to take extra care (and explain to others
>who are responsible for this machine) when upgrading to a debian
>package.  

There is more to a Debian packages than just the tar file.  The Debian
package also included scripts to cleanly install and deinstall the package.
This is how info pages get cleanly added to the info "dir", and other
things.

                                        Brian
                                 ( bcwhite@bnr.ca )

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    In theory, theory and practice are the same.  In practice, they're not.


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