[rescue] Re: Re: Small serial terminal

[Frank Van Damme]

	Uhm, this is about rescuing stuff, right? :-)


On Wednesday 19 February 2003 20:46, Joshua D. Boyd wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 19, 2003 at 07:52:12PM +0100, Frank Van Damme wrote:
> /usr and /lib are mostly there.  At least, they are there enough to get
> most day to day work done fine.
> 
> > What do the debian developpers waste their time with? What you need is
> > linux from scratch.
>
> Well, I was using debians package manager a lot, but I was never able to
> figure out how to make it install a package, even though it didn't think
> the dependecies were met.

dpkg -i --force-things . This is explained nicely in the man page.  There are 
maybe 20 things you can force :-)

> Then of course, the package manager failed altogether.

Bad blocks? I hope you moved it to another disk then? 

> Linux from scratch would nearly be right up my alley, except I never got
> around to it.  I've spent most of the past year trying to do things the
> debian way.  Most of the rest of my years using linux, a distribution
> was just a quick starting point, after which point I did everything as
> if from scratch.  And I chose distributions based on what was closest to
> what I wanted out of box, which currently means I want 2.4 immediately
> (though I'll recompile the kernel anyway, I don't really want to have to
> upgrade all the support programs), Xfree 4.2 immediately, emacs 21, GCC
> 3.2 immediately, and certain other utilities usefull for getting
> started, like a simple web browser, wget, telnet, ftp, etc.  Everything
> else (windowmanagers, desktop stuff, databases, web servers, etc), I was
> happy to build.

I wouldn't want such horror. I can't imagine managing 1000 packages by hand, 
including dependencies, not to mention the time it takes to compile them. 

btw Debian unstable has Xfree86 4.2.1, gcc 3.2 and I think emacs 21 too ;)

> Still, when it worked, debian's package management worked nicely.  Until
> it got torched, my only complaint was that I was never able to figure
> out how to force it to install a package whose dependencies weren't met
> according to the database.  This need was caused by needing to custom
> compile some packages (in particular, GTK+, since debian, last I
> checked, didn't have proper xinput support for using my wacom with the
> GIMP).  Since the package management got torched, someone pointed out
> that if I'd used apt to get the source, say for GTK, then programs that
> depend on GTK would consider the dependecy met.  Haven't verified this
> yet, though for obvious reasons.

That's right, it's the cleanest way to do that, and not too hard too. 
It goes like this:
# apt-get build-deps libgtk2.0-0
[time passes...]
#apt-get source libgtk2.0-0
[more time passes...]
# cd packagename && $EDITOR debian/rules

search for a phrase " # Add here commands to configure the package.". It 
should be pretty obvious. exit text editor.
# dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -us -uc
[yet more time passes...]
# dpkg -i ../packagename_version-revision_arch.deb

> I'll try the stuff you included on rebuilding when I get home
> tonight. I'm at work currently.

Good luck! Let me know if you run into trouble, maybe I can help out. 

-- 
Frank Van Damme
http://www.openstandaarden.be