Re: Is it safe to upgrade debhelper to potato, leaving the rest of slink?
On Fri, Feb 04, 2000 at 11:32:50AM +0100, Wojciech Zabolotny wrote:
> I'd like to compile/install the ted package on my slink box. Unfortunately
> the slink debhelper lacks the dh_installmime and dh_link functions, (and
> maybe some others) needed by the source package of ted.
> Is it safe to upgrade the debhelper alone, and leave the rest of the slink
> untouched? (I'm afraid, that I will be unable to recompile any standard
> slink packages after such change :-( ).
Wojciech,
If you want to install the potato debhelper there will be these problems:
- It uses a new switch of the potato version of chown (--no-dereference
I think).
- Therefor it does not install with the slink version of file-utils.
- It will build packages according to potato standards (e.g FHS).
- Maybe the perl dependency was changed recently (just a guess).
You could try to get the potato source, change dependencies, remove the
chown switch (it is used in dh_fixperms I think) and make a deb.
BUT MAKE SHURE YOUR CHOWN DOES NOT FOLLOW SYMLINKS !!! Read the manpages
on chown and lchown about this. They are a bit confusing but give you
an idea of the problem.
If your slink debhelper fails at this, I could think of this trick (which
I did not try myself):
Remove your slink debhelper, copy the changed scripts of the potato version
to /usr/local/bin, build the potato package and remove the scripts again.
The first way worked for me, but I can not check the version at the moment.
(The file-utils dependency was changed after some discussion about this
problem with (among others) Joey). I built several potato packages
successfully. But you may run into dependency problems when trying to build
some packages (logrotate is a candidate).
As for the FHS, I just added the new locations to the paths searched by
man and this is also possible for info, I think. Also some packages (or is
it debhelper?) provide symlinks from the old locations to the new ones. So
I think the problems about these potato-ish things should be acceptable if
you think you really *need* a certain potato package.
If you keep the slink and your potato debhelper packages, you can
(re-)install the version you need at the moment.
To get some of my part of this story see the January archive of debian-user
and look for "debhelper, potato sources on slink".
I hope this helps,
Jens
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