The purpose of this message is to inspire discussion with respect to
Debian's package dependency issues. I apologise if this is not the
proper venue for this, but I felt that the dpkg and deity development
lists would be even less appropriate. I also apologise if this has been
discussed before. I'm not extremely familiar with Debian's lists.
Often I like building my own packages from tar.gz sources, both for
regular programs and for development libraries. I also like using
dselect for managing those packages which I don't compile myself. This
way of doing things is sometimes difficult because of certain package
dependencies, both hard and suggested. This is a problem, as I don't
like having to manually override package installation every time I
install something new. I really don't want to cease using dselect, but
it can be trouble sometimes.
I would like to freely customise my system without causing package
dependency problems. The best solution I can think of is to be able to
"dummy install" any package that is not considered to be "critical". I
could dummy install certain libraries, for instance, providing instead
my own versions of these libraries. It's about making customization
easier.
Doing a dummy install should be a trivial matter. It might be as simple
as doing a regular install, selecting the package for dummy install with
a special key combination (similar to + - _ = : options). All this would
do is to satisfy other packages' dependencies requiring the presence of
the package being installed; nothing is really installed.
I feel this would be a great asset to users who like to compile their
own packages from sources other than Debian's, while also preserving
some of the benefits inherent in Debian's package system.
What do you people think?
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