On Wed, Aug 21, 2024 at 11:57:06 +0100, Jonathan Dowland wrote: > On Tue Aug 20, 2024 at 1:55 PM BST, Greg Wooledge wrote: > > You're saying that you use equivs to create packages that have the SAME > > NAMES as Debian packages?? > > That's entirely the point of it, surely. You want to convince the > packaging system that you have dependency $FOO satisfied, even if you > don't. You create an "equivalent" metapackage.
The only way I've used equivs is to produce a package named mta-local which looks like this: hobbit:~$ dpkg -s mta-local Package: mta-local Status: install ok installed Priority: optional Section: misc Installed-Size: 9 Maintainer: Equivs Dummy Package Generator <g...@hobbit.wooledge.org> Architecture: all Multi-Arch: foreign Version: 1.0 Provides: mail-transport-agent Conflicts: mail-transport-agent Description: A local MTA package A package, which can be used to establish a locally installed mail transport agent. It provides mail-transport-agent, so programs like bsd-mailx have their dependencies satisfied. I run a locally compiled qmail installation, not from the Debian packages, if such packages even still exist. The idea that I would do this but name it something like "sendmail" instead of "mta-local" sounds extremely sketchy. As I said previously, I know some other people use equivs to generate a package of their own making that contains a bunch of Depends lines, to bring in all of the software they want during a new installation. In that case, it would also not make sense for their locally built package to share a name with any Debian package.
