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I don't even know if this is possible, but I'll ask anyway.

I'm building a Linux From Scratch system, and I'm pretty close to the end. Obviously, everything until now has been compiled and installed from source. So I decided to install dpkg for future package management. However, pretty much every .deb file I try to install has some dependency like libc, libstdc++ or coreutils. I know I have installed them before, but dpkg doesn't recognize them. Is there any way to make this work, or if there isn't, a possible alternative?

I've already asked in a LFS forum, but it's pretty inactive and I got no answer.

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  • You will have to adapt dpkg to your system. That is no trivial task, but you can have a look at the debian docs. If your goal is to use debian packages, then you're doing it wrong. – Ярослав Рахматуллин Oct 28 '12 at 2:02
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There are probably ways to hack around this, but it's not something I'd do. The point of a package management system is that it manages everything so that it all fits together.

Installing a bunch of dummy packages would make the dependency issue disappear, but unless you have all the dependencies in the exact location they're meant to be whatever you're installing won't work.

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  • So is there any solution? – Javier Aug 22 '09 at 2:18
  • Simple answer: no not really. – theotherreceive Aug 22 '09 at 3:52
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Both dpkg / apt and rpm are built with the assumption that they will manage all the software on the system (with the possible exception of a few special applications). There's no reasonable way to get around that; you can hack away until you get it to work, but then what's the point of even using them.

If you just want to install the contents of a .deb (or .rpm), you can just extract the files & install them (using ar and tar for .deb, rpm2cpio and cpio for rpm). If you want to use the full dependency system, then you need a full installation.

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By creating "Linux from scratch" you actually created a brand new Linux distribution. So now you can choose whatever packaging system (deb, rpm, tgz,...) on the top of that core you have. Choosing deb will not make your distro become Debian!

This means you can still use debs to install additional SW, but you will have to create the packages by your own ("from scratch" again) with the dependencies made for your distro, and not just taking the Debian ones.

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