#1 2017-06-21 00:47:28

KrunchTime

Member

Registered: 2015-09-29

Posts: 857

Using dpkg-repack to Create a Deb from an Installed Package

I discovered this gem of a tool a few days ago and finally got around to giving it a try early this morning.

I've pretty much recovered from my recent disaster and attempted to install Rainlendar under Debian Unstable, only to discover that the package libpng12-0 is currently unavailable in the Unstable repos.  I might have been able to pull the version from Testing, but the version I had under Debian Unstable on my laptop was newer.

So, I did a bit of Internet sleuthing and discovered dpkg-repack.  dpkg-repack enables you to create a deb from a currently installed package.  I was able to create a deb from libpng12-0 on my laptop (Unstable instance) and install it on my desktop (Unstable instance).  I was then able to successfully install Rainlendar.

There are some caveats to using dpkg-repack, but they don't look harmful to me.  More info about dpkg-repack here.

Note: The previous link must be a bit dated because it is missing the option of marking a package (the created deb?) as being repacked.  When I installed the repacked package on my desktop, there was some verbage about the package being repacked and I didn't use that option when creating the deb.

My caveat:  DO NOT use this to install packages from Testing/Unstable environments into a Stable environment.  Doing so may bork your system.

Last edited by KrunchTime (2017-06-21 00:57:49)

DeepDayze

Like sands through an hourglass...

From: In Linux Land

Registered: 2017-05-28

Posts: 1,901

Re: Using dpkg-repack to Create a Deb from an Installed Package

I believe you can find many older Debian packages in the Debian Snapshots repository as well

http://snapshot.debian.org/

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Real Men Use Linux

KrunchTime

Member

Registered: 2015-09-29

Posts: 857

Re: Using dpkg-repack to Create a Deb from an Installed Package

Thank you for that, DeepDayze.  I was wondering if there was some kind of archive repo containing older packages.

20170622-01 edit:  Just checked it out.  The site is actually an archive snapshot.  I was hoping more for an archive repo where I could query a particular package and install my preferred version of said package.  I also attempted to search for the libpng12-0 package on the site and the search returned zero results.

20170622-02 edit:  My bad.  I searched source packages instead of binary packages.  I found plenty of older versions of libpng12-0 using the binary packages search.

Last edited by KrunchTime (2017-06-22 20:24:14)