installing sids partimage on sarge

by plugwash on 20061027
sarge did not ship with partimage (it was RC buggy at the time) and backports.org didn't have it either so i decided to install from the sid source package

this page documents what i found and how to get it to work.

the first thing i did was add sid source packages (NOT binary packages) to my sources.list. this meant i could use "apt-get build-dep" and "apt-get source -b" to work with the sid source packages.

next i did "apt-get update" followed by "apt-get source -b partimage" the result was unsurprisingly some failed build-deps. apt-get build-dep wasn't any help as it just said it couldn't find the build deps. Time to do some manual chasing.

"debhelper (>= 5.0.0)" is the biggest problem, suffice it to say don't try to build sids version on sarge, after following a long train of versioned deps/build-deps you will hit a loop.

The soloution is to get a version in between sarge's version and sid/etch's. snapshot.debian.net comes to the rescue here. Following the changelog of debhelper gives us a date for 5.0.0 of "Tue, 1 Nov 2005 18:54:29 -0500" and by starting at that date and going forward we find the package at http://snapshot.debian.net/archive/2005/11/04/debian/pool/main/d/debhelper/debhelper_5.0.0_all.deb (because its an arch-all package we don't even need to rebuilt it).

Once the new debhelper is installer you should be able to build partimage with "apt-get build-dep partimage" and "apt-get source -b partimage"

there is one final issue and that is partimage won't run if the kernel was compiled with devfs but devfs is not in use. My soloution to this was to upgrade to a backports.org kernel which dates from after the scrapping of devfs, a custom built kernel is another option if you wish.