I have been using Debian since the old A.out days of Debian 1.0, and I was wondering since I am doing development of our company's own Linux distribution based on Debian... I have potato as the base and am beginning to customize and modify it, but haven't really yet... other than Windowmaker graphics and WDM graphics..
Is it OK to carefully modify /var/lib/dpkg/status? I need to basically stave off dselect because every time I do an alien package or just something that isn't in the Packages.gz file. I haven't built all binary CD's yet... just the first... though that will change. It goes in and gives me dependency conflict, then decides it wants to remove my stuff. I Give it a big Fat capital R and then Q to force it not to do that, but I'd like it not to decide these things on its own. I've had some luck in the past directly modifying the status file, but sometimes it doesn't work. Is there any way to modify deb packages to change their dependencies since some of the packages are plain stupid... they depend on perl for instance and I have perl5.005, so I end up doing a dpkg -i --force-depends... which works, but if you go into dselect afterwards it wants to remove perl5.005 because it conflicts with the nonexistant package perl, and decides to remove about half my system (lots of things depend on perl) which I refuse the changes and force quit the dependency checker back to the menu. I'd love to say NO IT DOESN't DEPEND ON THAT PACKAGE YOU [EMAIL PROTECTED] now install and don't talk to me again! KDE stuff wouldn't go on because it wanted stdc++2.9, and it was too stupid to realize 2.10 was newer... I had to force each and every kde package... it worked too, but I gave up on keeping kde because every time I wanted to add new packages it wanted to kill kde. This is my only complaint about Debian, but it needs to have this feature... a checkbox for are you really sure you want to modify dependencies... (this may break...blah blah)...disclaimer, but let you do it. Those of us customizing Debian to strange hardware need a bit more freedom with this. Anyone...? Andrew
