Basically, I found a piece of software as an rpm say, hello.rpm, and converted it to hello.deb using alien. I know what the dependencies are and manually installed them using aptitude, then installed the *.deb with
dpkg -i hello.deb.
Anyway, next I created a local apt repository containing hello.deb and the dependencies for my lan. That all works fine.
What I want to do now is make it so that I can just
aptitude install hello.deb and it will install all the dependencies as well. I realize that I probably have to manually create the file with the dependencies. After doing some googling, I think what I need to do is create a meta pacakge using
equivs to specify the dependencies.
Does that sound like the right way to skin this cat? The hello.deb program is just a simple test program right now. The idea is that I don't want to have to use deporphan or keep a list of what dependencies I installed separately just for this one program I converted using alien.
The reason for this exercise is to eventually use this method for setting up something more complex, like Compiz/XGL following this
guide, which requires the use of alien.
Granted, I know the right way to do it is probably to learn how to build a proper debian package from source. But that seemed like a big leap for me at this point with something as large as compiz/xgl. I was thinking more along the lines of baby stepping...
