cbagger01
Group: Members
Posts: 4264
Joined: Oct. 2003 |
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Posted: Oct. 07 2004,17:13 |
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All of these comments are helpful in getting to the promised land.
If you use the deb inside a dsl with wrapper to dpkg -i filename.deb, you get the following benefits:
1) You can still get myDSL menu customization functionality.
2) Even though you are using "dpkg -i" instead of "apt-get install", you are still using the Debian package management system to handle version control and dependencies. "dpkg -i" is just a different method of getting the packaged installed and does not bypass the management functions unless you deliberately order the system to bypass the management, which is also true for apt-get.
3) You can still "factor out" the dependencies into separate extensions that can be installed for use by more than one application. This is true for most applications, ones that have a "newer than version x.xx" dependency requirement instead of a "specific depdendency version number x.xx required".
4) You can still follow the DSL philosophy of removing unneeded files and documentation. It is just a little bit harder to do it using this method. It is possible to rebuild a debian package with certain files removed to decrease size. I believe that the command is something like dpkg -repack packagename or something like that. A documentation check is needed in order to re-learn the exact command syntax.
There is not an easy solution for the /opt/extensionname LD_LIBRARY_PATH wrapper situation because these types of extensions are going outside of the normal Debian installation rulebook. However, it is technically possible to build a new *.deb pacakge that contains the custom install files and also lists the correct dependencies. The Knoppix team has already done this for some of their stuff on the knoppix livecd. For example, if you look inside the alsadebs directory you will see a knoppix customized alsa deb package that is tweaked from the standard alsa installation. Why? Because the knoppix folks needed to make some changes in order for alsa to work properly with both their standard 2.4.26 kernel and also with their optional 2.6.x testing kernels. However, this build-from-the-ground-up exercise is not for the novice user and I wouldn't know where to begin myself.
As for the debs vs. dsls debate,
I would prefer to describe it as debs & dsls, or maybe debs IN dsls 
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