Re: question about .deb packages
"D. Hoyem" <youto_22554@yahoo.com> wrote:
>I would like to install a later version of Xchat than what comes with
>Potato 2.2r.2. When I try to install the xchat-gnome_1.6.4 the
>maintainer has it depending on newer libs that what is in Potato.
> Is there a way to open a .deb and modify the dependencies to what is
>on Potato?
> I know that I can install the 1.6.4.tar.gz on any other current
>distro and do not get all of these depends. It seem that with debian we
>are dependent on what the maintainer wants us to have in order for us
>to use updated versions of programs.
Not at all, because you can compile the program from source in just the
same way on Debian. Binary packages, however, are almost always compiled
against shared libraries, and it's in the nature of shared libraries
that you can only use a library that was so much older than the version
against which the program was compiled (binary compatibility is broken
every so often, while breaking source compatibility is taken much more
seriously).
So there is no evil cabal of maintainers trying to get you to upgrade to
unstable (in fact, the only way in which the maintainer of xchat-gnome
could have avoided this would have been by compiling on stable himself,
but that can lead to other problems if library packages have been
rearranged since). All you need to do is download the source package and
build a .deb from source yourself. This is a FAQ, so it should be
reasonably easy to find out how to do that.
--
Colin Watson [cjw44@flatline.org.uk]
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