rpm - checkinstall - apt problem

[Kurt Wall]

In a 1.5K blaze of typing glory, Klaus-Peter Schrage wrote:
> 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 ...

Yes. My stab at it would be to edit the Makefile for libusb and add a
symlink step for the "install" target. I'm not immediately certain that
this would do the right thing for checkinstall to add the symlink to
the RPM/apt database/cache to satisfy dependencies, though. 

<luddite>
These package managers just baffle me.
</luddite>

Kurt
-- 
Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.
		-- Eric Hoffer