On Thu, Oct 21, 1999 at 11:28:15AM +0200, Daniel Haude wrote: > Hi, > > I have a question related to installing non-debian programs: > > When I first installed Debian 2.1, I noticed that it came with teTeX 0.9. > I un-installed that and installed teTeX-1.0 from the CTAN archive. Of > course, the debian package manager doesn't know about this, so whenever I > use dselect, it comes up with this old "some package needs teTeX" line. I > once even didn't notice and let dselect have its way, so all of a sudden > it started installing teTeX 0.9. I hit Ctrl-C to stop that (I know, bad > idea), and now teTeX 0.9 is so fucked up that dselect won't even > un-install whatever fragments it managed to put on the disk. It tells me > to install it first and then un-install it. > > In this case, this is not a big problem because I have teTeX entirely > under its own tree in /usr/local/teTeX, so messing around with another > version will not do any damage. But if I had installed teTeX-1.0 in the > same place as 0.9, it would now certainly be broken.
You should _always_ install non-debian packages under /usr/local. That is the only way to guarantee that debian will not fudge with it. Practically all compilable software you find in the wild will by default install itself in /usr/local anyway. > Is there a way to tell dselect: "I installed sucha-and-such myself, it's > there, so stop bitching (and remember next time)"? I know that this is > somewhat against the whole idea of packet management. Is making a .tar.gz > into a .deb package the only clean way? What if I don't want to make the > .tar.gzipped source tree the packege, but the "make install"ed result > (with all its files scattered in various places of the system)? The equivs package was designed to deal with this situation. HTH, Eric -- E.L. Meijer ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Eindhoven Univ. of Technology Lab. for Catalysis and Inorg. Chem. (SKA)
