creating private versions of public packages with changes (naming & versioning issue)

[Michael Barrett]

Thanks - yeah, I haven't seen anything online or in the packaging manual
that suggests how this should be handled.  I liked your idea of using the
epoch - but then I saw this:


# dpkg -l | awk '{print $3}' | grep ":" | wc -l
132

That's on my vagrant ubuntu 12.04 box, so it seems like epoch is used by
quite a few packages (like 10% of the installed packages on my VM).

Anyone else have any ideas?


On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 11:44 AM, Avi Greenbury <lists at avi.co> wrote:

> Michael Barrett wrote:
> > Another way I've done this is by prepending something to the name of the
> > package - so, for example, nginx would become
> > <company_abbreviation>-nginx.  I make sure that the new  packages have a
> > Conflicts: set to the old named version of the package.  This works
> > well, but it becomes more complicated when you start to deal with
> > libraries.  You end up needing to then create personal versions of the
> > things that use those libraries (sometimes other libraries).. and so on
> > down the chain.  This doesn't seem very efficient.
>
> This is how I tend to do it, with similar problematic caveats that I've
> only just had to think about actually considering in anger.
>
> > I've also thought about trying to come up with a version string that is
> > unlikely to be trumped by the 'real' versions of the packages - instead
> > of going from 0ubuntu1 to 0ubuntu2, I instead change it to something
> > like 7ubuntu1.  This works, but it feels a little weak.
> >
> > Anyway, I'm curious how people deal with this - and if there's a
> > standard way to do this that I haven't yet found.
>
> My current (untested) favoured option is to increment the epoch; for
> example when I repackage libpcap which is currently:
>
>  libpcap0.8   1.1.1-2+squeeze1
>
> I'll probably create one that comes out like this:
>
>  libpcap0.8   1:1.1.1-2+squeeze1
>
> which guarantees that it will always be higher-versioned than the debian
> package, but also mean I can encode in the version string where it came
> from so I know what it's 'my' version of.
>
> Unfortunately, my reading of the Debian policy doesn't suggest a
> 'proper' way to deal with this - having my own version of the Debian
> package that I wish to always be preferred to the equal-versioned Debian
> one. That said, I didn't think to mail the user lists and see what
> anyone else was doing :)
>
> --
> Avi
>
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-- 
Michael Barrett
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