On Wed, May 22, 2002 at 12:44:39PM -0700, Aleksey Tsalolikhin wrote: > On Tue, May 21, 2002 at 10:03:40AM +0100, Colin Watson wrote: > > Well, to some extent. But there's no reason you can't install another > > file in its place once it's diverted. > > Manually, right? But I want to do it with dpkg. :) > > I want to be able to install letters-1.0p1.deb (to change just one file) > and then later letters-2.0.deb (replace all the files).
In that case I misunderstood your original spec. Ignore what I said about dpkg-divert. > > In that case, you could always just rebuild the letters package from > > source with the changes ... > > *nod* What my example omits is the deb actually contains thousands of > files. Rebuilding it and installing it just to change tens of files > is inconvenient, which is why I'm looking into patch packages. > > I am trying to find out if it's possible to build a patch dpkg to do > incremental upgrade. (ie to upgrade just one or two files, not all files). You can unpack the .deb manually and alter files in the tarball. With the new files in the current directory arranged the way they would be in the filesystem, do something like this (untested): ar x foo.deb data.tar.gz gunzip data.tar.gz tar -rf data.tar ./my/new/file ./my/other/new/file gzip data.tar ar r foo.deb data.tar.gz sudo dpkg -i foo.deb Somewhere in there you'll probably also want to unpack control.tar.gz and fiddle with the control file to change the version number. The alternative, if you don't want to reinstall the package, is to edit the files in-place and also (carefully!) edit /var/lib/dpkg/status to keep track of this (plus /var/lib/dpkg/info/*.list if you're changing the files owned by each package). You could probably build a tool to do this automatically and call it a "patch dpkg" if you want, but I don't believe it currently exists. You might also want to look at dpkg-repack, which could possibly be modified to change the version number for you. -- Colin Watson [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
