>Using dpkg this way is great for my proposed source packages, but it is >also useful for any Debian package you might want to install in >user space only.
Clever -- but an amazing kludge :-) Remember that it's ok for this to be hackish for "installing debian packages in user space" because that's simply a *rare* operation -- the whole point of debian packages is that they fit cleanly into a debian system. However, I'd suggest that *most* of the times that a source package is installed at all, it will be installed in user space -- either by a user patching or just being curious about a particular package, or by a developer doing the next release. We may disagree on this, but I think it is more an issue of "knowing the customer" than of philosophy. It seems from your comments that you haven't walked through the complexity of building one of your src.deb packages -- say, from new upstream sources. I do that often enough that I'd find it useful to have a dpkg-source --upgrade: something that takes an a .dsc and applies it to the "wrong" source tar file (probably explicitly listed on the command line.) It could be clever in a number of ways (though that sounds more like a deb-make style heuristic) or it could just run patch and let you know where it failed. (On the other hand, for some packages I often just try again with the pristine upstream sources *first* just to see if the debian patches are still needed...)
