Problem installing from deb file and ignoring dependencies

[Colin Law]

On 27 August 2012 10:15, Tom H <tomh0665 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 27, 2012 at 4:42 AM, Colin Law <clanlaw at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> I am trying to install a package A (from a .deb file) that depends on
>> package B, but B is not available for my platform so I have built B
>> from source.  I cannot install A by using
>> dpkg -i A.deb
>> as it complains about the missing dependency.  I can install it by using
>> dpkg -i --ignore-depends=B A.deb
>> but this is not a good solution as the next time I install something
>> it complains about the package being broken.
>>
>> I have got over the problem by unpacking A.deb, removing the
>> dependency and repackaging but I feel this cannot be that unusual a
>> requirement and there must be a better way.  As it stands I will have
>> to repeat the exercise to install an upgrade to A.
>
> I assume that when you say "install from source" you're using
> "./configure; make; make install" and B's installed into
> "/usr/local/".

Yes, more or less.

>
> I see two possibilities.
>
> 1) Build a deb rather than use the above method. I tried once to build
> a deb of the latest grub, from upstream rather than debianized
> sources, and failed miserably. I didn't try particularly hard to find
> out why because I was under time pressure but it seemed more
> complicated than building an rpm (probably because I'm quite used to
> building the latter but who knows; preseed's more complicated than
> kickstart).

A possibility certainly.

>
> 2) Use "equivs-control B; equivs-build B; dpkg -i B" ("apt-get install
> equivs") to build a dummy B package and install it so A's dependency's
> satisfied.

That looks like a nice easy way out I thought.  Then I did
sudo apt-get install equivs
and it wanted to install 90 packages, download 33MB and use an
additional 114MB, including for example conkeror which seems rather
odd and unnecessary on my little headless SheevaPlug running off SD
card.  So I decided against it.

Thanks anyway

Colin
>
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