Re: Long time Debian user with semi-technical question
On Tue, Apr 25, 2000 at 12:02:36AM -0400, Andrew Weiss wrote: I have been using Debian since the old A.out days of Debian 1.0, and I was A remark like this makes me wonder if you REALLY WERE a user back then. :) 1) There was no Debian 1.0. InfoMagic saw to that. 2) The first official Debian release (1.1 or buzz) was ELF-based. 3) The previous numbered version, 0.93R6, was a.out-based. -- G. Branden Robinson| Debian GNU/Linux |Never attribute to malice that which can [EMAIL PROTECTED] |be adequately explained by stupidity. roger.ecn.purdue.edu/~branden/ | pgpHcRijFf14N.pgp Description: PGP signature
RE: Long time Debian user with semi-technical question
Doesn't it make you wonder how many people have really been using Debian or Linux for that matter for as long as they claim they have been... makes you wonder... hmmm... But I am no Minesweeper Champion and Solitaire Expertso what do I know? Mike Huddleson -Original Message- From: Branden Robinson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, April 25, 2000 8:40 PM To: debian-user@lists.debian.org; debian-cd@lists.debian.org; debian-devel@lists.debian.org Subject: Re: Long time Debian user with semi-technical question On Tue, Apr 25, 2000 at 12:02:36AM -0400, Andrew Weiss wrote: I have been using Debian since the old A.out days of Debian 1.0, and I was A remark like this makes me wonder if you REALLY WERE a user back then. :) 1) There was no Debian 1.0. InfoMagic saw to that. 2) The first official Debian release (1.1 or buzz) was ELF-based. 3) The previous numbered version, 0.93R6, was a.out-based. -- G. Branden Robinson| Debian GNU/Linux |Never attribute to malice that which can [EMAIL PROTECTED] |be adequately explained by stupidity. roger.ecn.purdue.edu/~branden/ |
Long time Debian user with semi-technical question
I have been using Debian since the old A.out days of Debian 1.0, and I was wondering since I am doing development of our company's own Linux distribution based on Debian... I have potato as the base and am beginning to customize and modify it, but haven't really yet... other than Windowmaker graphics and WDM graphics.. Is it OK to carefully modify /var/lib/dpkg/status? I need to basically stave off dselect because every time I do an alien package or just something that isn't in the Packages.gz file. I haven't built all binary CD's yet... just the first... though that will change. It goes in and gives me dependency conflict, then decides it wants to remove my stuff. I Give it a big Fat capital R and then Q to force it not to do that, but I'd like it not to decide these things on its own. I've had some luck in the past directly modifying the status file, but sometimes it doesn't work. Is there any way to modify deb packages to change their dependencies since some of the packages are plain stupid... they depend on perl for instance and I have perl5.005, so I end up doing a dpkg -i --force-depends... which works, but if you go into dselect afterwards it wants to remove perl5.005 because it conflicts with the nonexistant package perl, and decides to remove about half my system (lots of things depend on perl) which I refuse the changes and force quit the dependency checker back to the menu. I'd love to say NO IT DOESN't DEPEND ON THAT PACKAGE YOU [EMAIL PROTECTED] now install and don't talk to me again! KDE stuff wouldn't go on because it wanted stdc++2.9, and it was too stupid to realize 2.10 was newer... I had to force each and every kde package... it worked too, but I gave up on keeping kde because every time I wanted to add new packages it wanted to kill kde. This is my only complaint about Debian, but it needs to have this feature... a checkbox for are you really sure you want to modify dependencies... (this may break...blah blah)...disclaimer, but let you do it. Those of us customizing Debian to strange hardware need a bit more freedom with this. Anyone...? Andrew
Re: Long time Debian user with semi-technical question
On Tue, Apr 25, 2000 at 12:02:36AM -0400, Andrew Weiss wrote: Is it OK to carefully modify /var/lib/dpkg/status? It should be unnessecary. doesn't work. Is there any way to modify deb packages to change their dependencies since some of the packages are plain stupid... they depend on perl for instance and I have perl5.005, so I end up doing a dpkg -i --force-depends... which works, but if you go into dselect afterwards it They shouldn't depend on perl. If anything depends on Perl in Potato, that's a RC bug. You need to do a full upgrade to Potato for everything to work, though. [EMAIL PROTECTED] now install and don't talk to me again! KDE stuff wouldn't go on because it wanted stdc++2.9, and it was too stupid to realize 2.10 was newer... I had to force each and every kde package... it worked too, but I Um.. no. I don't know why it worked - you must have a copy of libstdc++2.9 somewhere around, but libstdc++2.10 is (a) not binary compatible with 2.9 and (b) wouldn't satisfy the runtime dependency of 2.9. Any program that depends on libstdc++2.9 without it installed should have failed to run, with a missing library dependency. If you still have anything about, do ldd on it, and it should show you where that erstz libstdc++2.9 is hiding. it. Those of us customizing Debian to strange hardware need a bit more freedom with this. Anyone...? If you need to modify dependencies, I mean really need to modify depenedencies, download the source and edit debian/control. In both your examples, there are better ways than hacking dependencies. -- David Starner - [EMAIL PROTECTED] The hell that is supposed out there could be no worse than the hell that is sometimes seen in here.
Re: Long time Debian user with semi-technical question
On 24-Apr-00, 23:02 (CDT), Andrew Weiss [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I have been using Debian since the old A.out days of Debian 1.0, and I was wondering since I am doing development of our company's own Linux distribution based on Debian... I have potato as the base and am beginning to customize and modify it, but haven't really yet... other than Windowmaker graphics and WDM graphics.. Is it OK to carefully modify /var/lib/dpkg/status? Along with what David Starner said, you might also want to check out the equivs package. It's not the away around the perl problem (as he wrote, nothing should depend on perl, but it may help with your other problems.
Re: Long time Debian user with semi-technical question
On Tue, 25 Apr 2000, Andrew Weiss wrote: I have been using Debian since the old A.out days of Debian 1.0, and I was wondering since I am doing development of our company's own Linux distribution based on Debian... I have potato as the base and am beginning to customize and modify it, but haven't really yet... other than Windowmaker graphics and WDM graphics.. Is it OK to carefully modify /var/lib/dpkg/status? I've modified it once, don't remember exactly what, but it was a dependency conflict that I had to solve. KDE stuff wouldn't go on because it wanted stdc++2.9, and it was too stupid to realize 2.10 was newer... I had to force each and every kde package... it worked too, but I gave up on keeping kde because every time I wanted to add new packages it wanted to kill kde. Why don't you install libstdc++2.9? I have both 2.9 and 2.10 installed (with KDE depending on 2.9) and have no dependency problem.
Re: Long time Debian user with semi-technical question
On Tue, 25 Apr 2000, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: If you need to modify dependencies, I mean really need to modify depenedencies, download the source and edit debian/control. In both your examples, there are better ways than hacking dependencies. Huh...download the source too ? You can edit the control file by unpacking the binary package like this: mkdir packagename dpkg-deb -X packagename_rev.deb packagename cd packagename dpkg-deb -e ../packagename_rev.deb Now it's all there. If you've finished editing, repack it: cd .. dpkg-deb -b packagename I do this when I have to fix the directory structure of alien-converted rpms.
