On Sat, May 05, 2001 at 10:00:14PM +0200, Egon Willighagen wrote: > Hi all, > > maybe it is a stupid question, but can debian packages be installed in other > places than / ?
It is not a stupid question, IMHO. Unfortunately, I believe the answer is "not in general". One of the problems is that .debs tend to install config files in /etc. I would suggest a search of the -devel archives, as this has come up at least once in the past year or so. > I know that when the package is compiled the Makefile has a $DESTDIR > attribute, but is this preserved in the deb package? > > This issue came up when i tried to convince someone that debian packages > are a good addition to tar.gz for distribution... but one argument he gave, > was the question if non-root users could install debian packages? > > Is this possible? I think it is desirable, but I think it requires non-trivial changes to several bits of the packaging system. If you do the search of the archives, you might post a summary of what you find, to refresh our memories. -S