Re: Metapackaging
On Wed, Aug 21, 2024 at 11:57:06 +0100, Jonathan Dowland wrote:
> On Tue Aug 20, 2024 at 1:55 PM BST, Greg Wooledge wrote:
> > You're saying that you use equivs to create packages that have the SAME
> > NAMES as Debian packages??
>
> That's entirely the point of it, surely. You want to convince the
> packaging system that you have dependency $FOO satisfied, even if you
> don't. You create an "equivalent" metapackage.
The only way I've used equivs is to produce a package named mta-local
which looks like this:
hobbit:~$ dpkg -s mta-local
Package: mta-local
Status: install ok installed
Priority: optional
Section: misc
Installed-Size: 9
Maintainer: Equivs Dummy Package Generator <greg@hobbit.wooledge.org>
Architecture: all
Multi-Arch: foreign
Version: 1.0
Provides: mail-transport-agent
Conflicts: mail-transport-agent
Description: A local MTA package
A package, which can be used to establish a locally installed
mail transport agent.
It provides mail-transport-agent, so programs like bsd-mailx have their
dependencies satisfied.
I run a locally compiled qmail installation, not from the Debian packages,
if such packages even still exist.
The idea that I would do this but name it something like "sendmail"
instead of "mta-local" sounds extremely sketchy.
As I said previously, I know some other people use equivs to generate
a package of their own making that contains a bunch of Depends lines,
to bring in all of the software they want during a new installation.
In that case, it would also not make sense for their locally built
package to share a name with any Debian package.
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