• RelocatablePackages

RelocatablePackages

Status

• Created: 2005-07-17 by KennethArnold

• Status: DevelopmentProposal

Details

• Scenario 1: Most of the system uses KDE 3.3 (testing) but you want to test out the brand-new KDE 3.4 without affecting anyone else.
• Scenario 2: You don't have root on a Debian system, but it would really be nice to install a copy of 'file' to identify a strange file you found.
• Scenario 3: You're on a non-Debian system and not root, but you just like Debian and want to use its packages.

All 3 of these (and probably more) usage scenarios would be theade much easier if Debian packages could be relocatable. For example, the contents of the 'file' package might look like this:

conf/magic
bin/file
man/man1/file.1.gz
bug/presubj
doc/ChangeLog.gz
doc/copyright
doc/changelog.Debian.gz

During package install, each subdirectory would map to a configurable part of the real directory tree. For a full-system install, for example, 'conf' maps to '/etc', 'bin' maps to '/usr/bin', 'doc' maps to '/usr/share/doc/file', etc. But for a single-user install, perhaps 'conf' maps to '~/.file', 'bin' maps to '~/bin', doc maps to '~/doc/file', etc.

For this to work properly, a number of things would need to be in place:

• Each user could have a local dpkg status.
• The environment would have to be such that programs and libraries are found first in the user's home directory.
• Programs that depend on finding their files in certain places would have to be patched to look in the user's home directory, or perhaps a run-time interception of the 'open' call would suffice (LD_PRELOAD).
• others?

Pluggable handlers could be set up to process other directories.