Re: 4.3.0

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>]

On Mon, Jun 09, 2003 at 06:12:16PM -0400, Noah Meyerhans wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 09, 2003 at 08:28:00PM -0700, Piero wrote:
> > I had to install X 4.3 because former version didn't support my video 
> > card. I istalled it from a tarball downloaded from the Xfre86 site. Is 
> > it possible to "tell" the packages databae managed by dpkg or apt-get 
> > that this operation has been done?
> 
> You can build an "equivs" package, which is basically a completely
> empty .deb file that exists only to provide an entry in dpkg's database.
> "apt-get install equivs" and read the documentation.
> 
> One thing to keep in mind with a big package like X is that there are
> many binary packages installed from a single source package.  You
> undoubtedly overwrote file from xserver-xfree86, xserver-common,
> xfonts-base, and more.  In order to avoid potential trouble, you should
> build equivs packages to replace all of those.

You might not need to bother if you installed it the right way. As I
understand it, all you need for video card support is a new server
binary; the rest stays pretty binary-compatible. Since versioned
dependencies on the X server are vanishingly rare, you could just
install the xserver-xfree86 package, install only the new server binary
somewhere in /usr/local, and point the /etc/X11/X symlink at it.

-- 
Colin Watson                                  [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]