One of my favorite things about Debian is its awesome package management system. Apt is one of the reasons I have used Debian for servers for so many years and eased my initial transition to Ubuntu (which as most people know was initially a Debian fork). Apt is a great tool as long as you aren’t building packages from source (and not making debs out of them). I have packaged a whole bunch of debs, but sometimes it just isn’t necessary. So if you haven’t used equivs, then you need to check it out.
Essentially it allows you to create dummy debs to provide packages that you installed from source (circumvent dependency checking). It can get dirty when time comes to do dist-upgrades, but it has its usefulness. For example, I wanted to install altermime and I had installed the latest Postfix from source and altermime requires an MTA to be installed otherwise it would install exim (amongst other packages). So I built a dummy packages doing the following:
1 2 | # apt-get install equivs # equivs-control postfix |
That will create a file named postfix in the current directory. Make the file look similar to this:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 | Section: misc Priority: optional Standards-Version: 2.3.3 Package: postfix-dummy Version: 2.7.0 Section: mail Maintainer: Eric Lubow Provides: mail-transport-agent Architecture: all Description: Dummy Postfix package |
Then go ahead and build your dummy package:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 | # equivs-build postfix dh_testdir dh_testroot dh_clean -k dh_testdir dh_testroot dh_install dh_installdocs dh_installchangelogs dh_compress dh_fixperms dh_installdeb dh_gencontrol dh_md5sums dh_builddeb dpkg-deb: building package `postfix-dummy' in `../postfix-dummy_2.7.0_all.deb'. The package has been created. Attention, the package has been created in the current directory, not in ".." as indicated by the message above! |
Then I just installed the postfix-dummy package with:
1 | # dpkg -i postfix-dummy_2.7.0_all.deb |
And everything worked beautifully. I installed altermime with no problem and we were off to the races.
