rpm - checkinstall - apt problem

[Klaus-Peter Schrage]

95 % of the applications on my RH 9 system are are installed and
upgrades via rpm (resp. apt-get from different repositories).

The remaining 5 % are compiled from tarballs, and to keep my rpm 
database tidy, installed with checkinstall.

But sometimes there are problems with this mixed strategy when I have to 
do some post-install symlinking to libraries, eg:

Today I have upgraded libusb to recent version 0.1.8 (from source).
Now, after compilation, 'checkinstall' invokes 'make install' which
creates the library files and some symlinks in /usr/lib, among others
the main file
	libusb-0.1.4.4.0.
Earlier versions of libusb included a symlink
	libusb-0.1.so.4 -> libusb-0.1.4.xx
which is now missing, but most applications dependent on libusb can't be 
installed (via rpm or source compile) without libusb-0.1.so.4. Of 
course, it's no problem to manually create the symlink, but the rpm 
database and apt cache remain corrupted because of missing dependencies.

Now, here is a question at last: Is there any method to include the 
creation of such a symlink in the process invoked by 'make install' so 
that checkinstall might include it in the rpm build? I have browsed most 
configure, Makefile, install ... files in the source directory to get 
some hints, but to tell the truth, I have too little knowledge about the 
whole build process to see the obvious ...

Klaus