Debian concordance

[John Skaller]

On Tue, 2005-06-14 at 08:02 +0200, Maximilian Gerlach wrote:
> Hi John,
> they take the source and recompile it (with a slightly different
> instruction set, but that shouldn't matter). So if you take the source
> deb and compile it by yourself, everything should be fine.

Yes, but that's not what I want to do. I have a package manager,
I want it to install things. If I have to mess around building
a binary package by hand, then installing it .. I might as
well just download and build the original tarball.

The package manager either does the whole thing automatically
or it is useless.

So, more or less, I'm looking for an Ubuntu package called

debian-concordance

which contains virtual packages with *debian* names that
actually provide *ubuntu* packages, so that when I try
to install something out of the Debian archive, the package
manager will shut up and stop telling me I don't have the
right version of glibc6 installed. Because I do, ubuntu
just names it something different and incompatible. Grrrr ...
[Or something like that .. :]

So, once installed, I can grab something off the Debian
archive, and it will install properly. It will only grab
Dependencies off the Debian archive if there is no Ubuntu
equivalent.

Well thats the idea anyhow ...

At least one reason for asking -- I am packaging the Felix programming
language toolkit for Debian at the moment.  Clearly, I'd like to 
have it on Ubuntu too -- I'm running Ubuntu *and* I'm the upstream
author. But I don't really want to separately maintain yet another
package .. apart from the source tarball build there would be a 
Godi package, a Debian package, and an Ubuntu package (and I haven't
looked at rpm's or whatever other distros use yet) .. not to
mention Windows installers, OSX packages.. .. ARGGGGGG ... 

So both as a package client and developer .. I'm hoping there
is some way to reduce the pain .. :)

As it happens .. there was a bug in a dependent package 
which has now been fixed .. on Debian .. but I can't install
it .. because it isn't on Ubuntu yet.. if I add the Debian
archive to my /etc/apt/source.list file .. all hell breaks loose.
Ubuntu is already one whole sub-version behind Debian with
this package (the package is 'ocaml', latest is 3.08.3, 
Ubuntu mirror I'm using only has 3.08.2, and 
both are broken: the Debian one is now patched though ...)

-- 
John Skaller, skaller at users.sf.net
PO Box 401 Glebe, NSW 2037, Australia Ph:61-2-96600850 
Download Felix here: http://felix.sf.net