Telling aptitude I've already installed something

Question

Hi, I know this might be a non-sense question, but I have to ask. I installed TeXLive 2009 on Ubuntu 10.04 (x64), but I did it manually with the "install-tl" perl script following the directions on http://tug.org/texlive/doc.html. All the other software I've previously installed was through

sudo aptitude install package-name

The reason why I did a manual installation was because tlmgr doesn't install with the aptitude repositories version, and I wanted a quick way to install/uninstall TeXLive-latex related packages. Moreover, I read that, as a general rule, TeXLive Ubuntu repositories' are generally outdated.

The problem I'm facing now is that I need to install other related software, for example, auctex and when I issue

sudo aptitude install auctex

I get that all these packages will be installed:

 auctex emacs23{a} emacs23-bin-common{a} emacs23-common{a} 
  emacsen-common{a} lacheck{a} latex-beamer{a} latex-xcolor{a} lmodern{a} 
  luatex{a} pgf{a} preview-latex-style{a} prosper{a} ps2eps{a} 
  tex-common{a} texlive-base{a} texlive-binaries{a} texlive-common{a} 
  texlive-doc-base{a} texlive-extra-utils{a} texlive-font-utils{a} 
  texlive-generic-recommended{a} texlive-latex-base{a} 
  texlive-latex-base-doc{a} texlive-latex-recommended{a} 
  texlive-latex-recommended-doc{a} texlive-luatex{a} texlive-pstricks{a} 
  texlive-pstricks-doc{a} 

Even if I try something like

sudo aptitude install --without-recommends auctex

I still get

 auctex emacs23{a} emacs23-bin-common{a} emacs23-common{a} 
  emacsen-common{a} preview-latex-style{a} tex-common{a} 

Which is way better than before, but I'm still getting tex-common that is normally installed when TeXLive full installation is performed (I think). tex-common in turn, is installed because of preview-latex-style, which in turn is needed because auctex requires so.

So, my question. Is there any way to tell aptitude "Hey I've already installed these so don't worry about dependencies, I have these under control despite you'd never seen them before?"? Will auctex even work despite the manual installation of TeXLive?

Any help or idea is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

When you install a program that doesn't come through the packaging system, install it under /usr/local (or under /opt, or in your home directory, just not in /usr). Unless you're short of disk space, you can leave the packaged version if there is one.

Occasionally it can be useful to pretend a package is installed. This can be done by installing a dummy package that does nothing but require and provide dependencies. Debian-based systems (including Ubuntu) provide the equivs-build command in the equivs package. Quoting from the package description:

This package provides a tool to create Debian packages that only contain dependency information.

One use for this is to create a metapackage: a package whose sole purpose is to declare dependencies and conflicts on other packages so that these will be automatically installed, upgraded, or removed.

Another use is to circumvent dependency checking. If a package P is not installed on the system, packages that depend on P cannot normally be installed. However, if functionality equivalent to P is known to be installed, this tool can be used to trick the Debian package management system into believing that package P is actually installed. NOTE: this should be considered a crude hack to work around awkward situations, not a normal solution.

Answer 2

I can't take the whole mess of aptitude doing bananas just for the sake of having the most up to date LaTeX distribution. I tried DaveParillo's advice, installed with

aptitude install --without-recommends --prompt --safe-resolver auctex

It installed auctex and emacs. It didn't work. Apparently, auctex configuration has to be done from source, so the only solution to my above question would be to forget about aptitude (so yet again, DaveParillo was right, I messed up aptitude) and build auctex from source. And as you may be already figuring it out, this a huge ball coming, since every time I might need something related with LaTeX I'll need to build from source each and every program, so... Answering my second question: no, it will not work unless auctex is built from source with ./configure --funky-options-about-where-your-tex-installation-may-reside. Moreover, auctex extension was gone from Emacs when I restarted.

I removed auctex with

sudo aptitude purge auctex

and I removed TeXLive 2009 with "tlmgr", I'll install the one from Ubuntu's repositories. And I'll cope with that in the meantime. I love aptitude way of handling installations, but sometimes is just... Argh. Answering the main question "Is there any way to tell aptitude you've already done something manually?": no, in this particular experiment of mine, but I don't know if this might be possible with some experienced workaround solution.

Sorry for the inconvenience, guys. If this were a testing environment I'd go ahead and try doing everything manually, even if that means reinstalling the OS many times. But I just needed this working, and I can't go with that option. Thanks to everyone for your time and consideration.

Answer 3

You have bypassed the normal aptitude dependency system, so I think you may have problems. The simplest, but possibly tedious answer is to run aptitude with the --prompt option - it will ask you before each install (or removal) and you can choose which packages to install.

Since this question deals with hacking latex, you may to post this on the Tex - LaTex stack exchange