Re: Unofficial Debian package management
Carlos Sousa <csousa@tvtel.pt> writes:
> "man dpkg" shows an interesting option, -root. If this works as
> expected, it could be used to install .debs without "contaminating" the
> system.
It doesn't do what you expect. It's more intended to be used in a
situation like booting from the rescue disk, where your normal root
filesystem is mounted on /target; then you can use
'dpkg --root /target', since things like /target/var/lib/dpkg exist,
and when you reboot the system hard-coded paths in binaries (like
/etc) point to the right place.
> Can anybody see how else I could install unofficial .debs from private
> repositories, with an ease as close to "apt-get install package" as
> possible *but* keep them separate from the main Debian software within
> the system?
I've been using mini-dinstall to maintain a small private repository
(mostly with my custom-compiled kernels). You can add other things to
it, but it wants a full source package with a .changes file, which
means pretending to be a developer and building the package from
source yourself. Regardless, though, the current infrastructure
doesn't allow you to put Debian-standards-compliant software in .deb
packages into a different part of the filesystem at all.
--
David Maze dmaze@debian.org http://people.debian.org/~dmaze/
"Theoretical politics is interesting. Politicking should be illegal."
-- Abra Mitchell
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