Re: binaries into deb\'s [newbie]

[<lacostej@altern.org>]

Question:  how do I maintain the robustness of apt-get yet be able to download binaries and patches and compile them myself?  


There is a great tool called checkinstall that will monitor 'make install' commands and create deb pacakges out of them.
Checkinstall is in unstable. 

I would use it to create your packages they are not in Debian. 
After that you can do dpkg -i to install them. But to handle dependencies and/or share your pacakges on several machines, I would do the following:

Put your newly created s .debs in a directory, let's say /root/debs

Then you use a little script like this one:


#!/bin/sh
cd /root
touch anyname
dpkg-scanpackages debs anyname | gzip > debs/Packages.gz


That will create a Package list for your /root/debs directory. Rerun the script each time you add a package. You shouldn't need to remove the old ones. You can put a cron line to do this automatically if you want.

Finally add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb file:/root debs/ 

Hop, done. Next apt-get update, and apt-get install will take care of the rest.

Note: I didn't use the reply to list as I can't from where I am logged (ISP blocks me...). Please forward that to the list for me.