Hi, I have a question related to installing non-debian programs:
When I first installed Debian 2.1, I noticed that it came with teTeX 0.9. I un-installed that and installed teTeX-1.0 from the CTAN archive. Of course, the debian package manager doesn't know about this, so whenever I use dselect, it comes up with this old "some package needs teTeX" line. I once even didn't notice and let dselect have its way, so all of a sudden it started installing teTeX 0.9. I hit Ctrl-C to stop that (I know, bad idea), and now teTeX 0.9 is so fucked up that dselect won't even un-install whatever fragments it managed to put on the disk. It tells me to install it first and then un-install it. In this case, this is not a big problem because I have teTeX entirely under its own tree in /usr/local/teTeX, so messing around with another version will not do any damage. But if I had installed teTeX-1.0 in the same place as 0.9, it would now certainly be broken. Is there a way to tell dselect: "I installed sucha-and-such myself, it's there, so stop bitching (and remember next time)"? I know that this is somewhat against the whole idea of packet management. Is making a .tar.gz into a .deb package the only clean way? What if I don't want to make the .tar.gzipped source tree the packege, but the "make install"ed result (with all its files scattered in various places of the system)? Enough questions for today. --Daniel
