[Wylug-help] .deb equivs

[Aaron Crane]

Smylers writes:
> I wish to install a .deb package which depends on libcpanplus-perl.

Is that the exact spelling of the dependency that your .deb specifies?
The Debian/Ubuntu perl-modules package Provides: libcpan-plus-perl
(which is admittedly surprising, but that's nonetheless what they
have).

> So I used equivs to create a cpanplus-dummy package which Provides:
> libcpanplus-perl and Replaces: libcpanplus-perl (and Depends:
> perl-modules (>= 5.10.0)) and it successfully installed, but hasn't been
> sufficient to sate the original package.
> 
> I'm guessing that's because it Depends: libcpanplus-perl (>= 0.84) and
> the dummy package isn't stating which version it's providing.  Is that
> right?

I believe so.  I think versioned Provides: would solve this, but AFAIK
that isn't yet possible.

> And if so, is there any way round this or shall I just redundantly
> install libcpanplus-perl and put up with having two copies of it?

That would normally work fine, but I'm still concerned about the
package name mismatch -- I think you'd probably run into trouble if
you tried to install both a libcpanplus-perl and a libcpan-plus-perl
simultaneously (because they'd likely install the same files).

Another option would be to set the package name of your equivs package
to libcpanplus-perl, and its version to 0.84-1~local1 or some such.
This should finesse the versioned dependency issue.

I don't think that's the best approach, though.  I think that the .deb
you're trying to install is incorrect, and should therefore be fixed
and rebuilt.  Is that an option for you?

-- 
Aaron Crane ** http://aaroncrane.co.uk/