Just to make it clear, not to keep pounding, but: >Again, with the proposed system, this is easy - just install an upgraded >src-orig-*.deb file.
I don't think I'll find any src-orig-*.deb files on prep. My point was that I can take the .tar.gz files that I *do* find everywhere and just use them, without having to go through more [potentially error-prone] steps to repackage them first. > OK - I have definitely gotten the message that dpkg is "hands off" when > it comes to using for purposes other than what it was originally Hmm. I guess this is a little stronger message than I was intending, but it's probably close enough :-) Since you put it that way, yeah, dpkg is *not* a general purpose unix-style utility. How's this for a poor analogy - sed is a wrench, awk is a hammer, perl is vicegrips (you know, "the wrong tool for every job"...) dpkg is more like, lets see, brake-caliper-retractors? (a precision tool that is really only useful for one thing, but it's the tool you *have* to have for that job...) I'm quite convince that you won't find a tool that *does* the same thing that dpkg does -- because basically dpkg "handles a ton of details for debian". You might (I hope), find a tool that does a more generic form of what you're looking for (once you define it a little more generically.) Now you *might* want to look at the work of Brian Bartholomew, with pgfs and host-gen (there was an article by him about them in the last linux journal, or *maybe* the one before that...) not because they do anything like what you want, but because they do interesting things involving databases of pathnames (which, when it comes down to it, is the generic issue here, I think) and using more general purpose tools... so you might find more useful widgets there.
