On Sat, May 05, 2001 at 10:00:14PM +0200, Egon Willighagen wrote: > > maybe it is a stupid question, but can debian packages be installed in other > places than / ?
You could try the --root=dir, --admindir=dir or --instdir=dir options to dpkg. But I think that maybe this is not what you really want. > I know that when the package is compiled the Makefile has a $DESTDIR > attribute, but is this preserved in the deb package? If the Makefile in the original source provides this functionality, then that is convenient to use in the Debian package source's debian/rules Makefile to install the binaries into the package build directory. Related to this is the --prefix option that can be given to the typical configure script in the original sources. If you don't specify that option when you "./configure", it usually defaults to /usr/local. Debian packages are generally spoken configured with --prefix=/usr. If user "egon" wants to install into his home directory, he should run configure the source with --prefix=/home/egon. After building the program, doing a "make install" will put all the files somewhere in /home/egon. Also, the programs that are installed there will look for their settings under /home/egon instead of /etc. > This issue came up when i tried to convince someone that debian packages > are a good addition to tar.gz for distribution... but one argument he gave, > was the question if non-root users could install debian packages? Download package sources for your own rebuilding is just as easy as downloading the prebuilt .deb packages. Just add a "deb-src" line to your /etc/apt/sources.list file for every "deb" line it already has. After you "apt-get update", you can cd into a work directory and type: apt-get source somepkg Then, do a "cd somepkf-*" and look around in the various README, INSTALL and other textfiles. There is a directory debian/ which contains some maintainer files, one of which is the "rules" file. This is a Makefile that contains the rules to build the source for Debian and to create the .deb package. It gives you a very efficient way to find out if there are any special tricks needed to compile the source. Now you can run "./configure --help", "./configure [options]", "make" and "make install". > Is this possible? This is how it used to be before there was Debian ;-) Cheers, Joost