On Tue, Jan 04, 2000 at 11:47:57AM +0100, Jens Guenther wrote > Hi, > > I tried to build several potato packages for my slink machine. This failed, > because some debhelper scripts were not available. After installing the > potato version of debhelper, it failed again, this time because some command > (it might have been "chown") did not support some command line option. > > Under another subject this problem was mentioned recently, but the author > encountered problems related to debhelper and perl. > > This suggest to me, that > 1) dependencies of debhelper in potato are wrong > 2) (some/all) potato sources are build with potato debhelper > > Potato sources seem to be useless for slink installations. > > Does anybody know how to deal with this? >
I've had occasion to backport a lot of potato packages to slink (for inclusion on vendor CDs). I backported the debhelper package itself (which wasn't hard, but required acutally identifying the various potatoisms the scripts included, and backporting perl-5.004.05 just for the build process as well) and things got a fair bit easier from there. If you like I can mail you my .deb (debhelper_2.0.60huiac.slink.1_all.deb, 96Kb or so, installs cleanly on slink), which may make life easier for you. Other things to watch for when backporting from potato to slink: /usr/share/man -> /usr/man /usr/share/doc -> /usr/doc /usr/share/info -> /usr/info WMs use update-alternatives -> WMs dicker with /etc/X11/window-managers menu-2 syntax in menu-methods -> menu-1 syntax in menu-methods dependencies on perl5 -> dependencies on perl some .debs depend on debconf -> port debconf or remove the dependency. Note, if you backport perl the directory layout of /usr/lib/perl5 has changed in potato; if you use potato's layout, any package that installs files there will probably need to be rebuilt. John P. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Oh - I - you know - my job is to fear everything." - Bill Gates in Denmark