trevor
welcome to fink. looking at deb files directly can be done quite easily, run 'dpkg --contents <package.deb>' and you see the file listing. the confusion might arise however, as in fink a package listing as seen with 'fink list' or in FinkCommander does not mean that there is a .deb package for download. .deb packages do only exist for packages that are part of the fink binary distribution, all the others, and with it the whole unstable tree, you have to build the deb first yourself through fink. in your case ant is in the unstable tree, which means no .deb available, you have to build it yourself by running 'fink install ant'. as you have not (yet) enabled unstable but want a package that is in unstable it is a little more complicated but still possible and fairly simple after all.
In the world of Fink, however, the whole APT-based package management has me in a fog. My main frustration is that Fink seems to do everything it possibly can to prevent you from actually looking at any .deb files. While this is fine if you just want to install stable packages through, say, FinkCommander, I want to download a single unstable package and install it. The Fink docs describe how to switch your entire distribution to an unstable branch, but that's not what I want to do. I just want to install one of the unstable packages -- Ant 1.6.2 -- and thus avoid any problems that might occur from installing other unstable packages. Trouble is, I can't find Ant 1.6.2 anywhere. The Fink package database claims that it exists:
yes, it does exist. first of all you should run a 'fink selfupdate'. this gets you the newest package descriptions. to get access to the unstable packages you first have to enable the unstable tree, as mentioned in the fink docs. now if you do not want to enable the whole unstable tree but are only interested in one particular package (thats the case here i guess) there's also another way of doing that:
1) copy the ant info file (/sw/fink/10.3/unstable/main/finkinfo/devel/ant.info) to the local tree (/sw/fink/10.3/local/main/finkinfo/ ) eg run 'sudo cp /sw/fink/10.3/unstable/main/finkinfo/devel/ant.info /sw/fink/10.3/local/main/finkinfo/ '
2) copy and all of its dependencies that are not in the stable tree also to the local tree (this is important!)
make sure that the local tree shows up in you fink.conf (local/main). now a 'fink install ant' should do the job. it downloads the source, compiles it, builds a .deb archive and installs it.
P.S. On a related note, how do I query a package for a list of its dependencies? This was quite easy with RPM, but there doesn't seem to be any way to do it with Fink.
hmm... not that i know of (eg as a commandline argument) but someone else might be able to help. you can do a trial and error method in skipping step 2) from above, run 'fink install ant' and see whether it gives you dependency errors like 'could not resolve... not found'. then move the mentioned package to the local tree as mentioned in 2) and try again.
hth
mathias
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