I was trying to install texmaker a latex editor in my debian system from synaptic. It shows in the dependency list texlive-base, texlive-common. etc as dependencies. But I have already installed Texlive full from the source and its working fine.
Is there any way I could install texmaker from synaptic without installing the specified texlive dependencies?
Quoting the TeXLive & Debian documentation:
Tell APT about your TeX Live installation by building a dummy package using equivs:
$ aptitude install equivs # as root
mkdir /tmp/tl-equivs && cd /tmp/tl-equivs
equivs-control texlive-local
# edit texlive-local (see below)
$ equivs-build texlive-local
$ sudo dpkg -i texlive-local_2011-1_all.deb
At the step "edit texlive-local", edit the Maintainer field and the list of the packages provided by your local TeX Live installation as appropriate. If you installed
scheme-full except collection-texinfoas recommended, the file should look like this example.
One option would be to roll that installation into it's own package which you'd have to maintain. But in so doing this you'd be able to pacify synaptics' dependency checking.
Doing this sounds a lot harder than it is. There are a lot of good resources on the topic, such as this one titled: Rolling your own Debian packages (part 2), to get you started. Debian provide dh-make which helps with a lot of the heavy lifting.
Don't use synaptic. Just download the package you need, then use dpkg directly:
dpkg -i --ignore-depends=<package(s) to ignore> yourpackage.deb
--ignore-dependsis fine to use as a repair tool when the package database is hosed or to get through a painful upgrade, but it's something that you need to fix afterwards to get a working system.equivsis the way to go. – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' May 13 '13 at 22:52