Hi Jacob Meuser schrieb: > > On Wed, Feb 21, 2001 at 10:13:23AM +0000, Jacob Meuser wrote: > > > Is there a way to manually edit the database that says which packages > > > are installed? I set up a small system, using potato, and am adding > > > several packages from source. I added stuff like glib-1.2.8, tcl-8.32, > > > tk8.3.2, etc. How can I tell apt that these packages are installed? > > > Or at least make it think the potato version is installed.
> Well, that lead me to the files I was looking for: /var/lib/dpkg/* Some ideas on how to do this: If it's no disc space and bandwith problem for you, you could just as well install you locally compiled packages in /usr/local and keep the older packaged versions installed. Dependencies will be satisfied, and everything should be using the /usr/local version (there are some search path variables/configuration settings to assure this, like PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH//etc/ld.so.conf, MANPATH and so on). That's my prefered way to install (yet) unpackaged software. (Hint: have a look at 'stow'). In my experience this works much better than trying to manipulate the status database of dpkg. Another thing to look at is the equivs package, which provides tools to build empty dummy packages. Yet another way would be to grab the source of the debian packages, upgrade them and build actual debian packages of the new versions (and send any necessary modifications to the maintainer of the debian package), though this is probably not an option for you since it requires quite a lot of experience with packaging (even more if the debian package uses some obscure source format or is very old). Sometimes the debian maintainers are not even aware of new versions of theyer packages (though this usually only happens with smaller packages), thus dropping a notice pointing to the new version and politely asking why it isn't packaged could do the trick as well. HTH, 2ri -- When you think that Big Brother is watching you, try boring him to death.
