[ILUG] [Q] Pretend Ubuntu packages are installed?

[Andrew McCarthy]

On Wed, Dec 01, 2010 at 08:12:28PM +0100, Brian Foster wrote:
>  On Kbuntu 9.10, is there some way of telling (presumably)
>  apt-get(8) to not install certain “required” packages?
>  I want to install asciidoc(1), but it “requires” LaTeX,
>  which is Ok, except I've already got LaTeX installed via
>  TeXlive and have no interest in the Ubuntu packages.
> 
>  I could go ahead and install Ubuntu LaTeX, as it won't
>  (I know, having been in a similar situation before) feck
>  anything up, but it is not-needed and was rather confusing.
> 
>  And can I permanently mark it as “don't install, just
>  pretend/accept that it is installed” or similar?
>  And(sorry!) if that is possible, how would I remove the
>  marking (since “permanently” is a rather long time).

I see texlive is requested by dblatex, which is only under "Recommends".
If you don't need dblatex for asciidoc to work, you can run
	apt-get --no-install-recommends asciidoc

Alternatively, and more usefully in the long-run, you can use the
"equivs" package to build a minimal .deb that will pretend to provide
the dependency. Install equivs and create a file "fake-texlive" with
these two lines:

	Package: fake-texlive
	Provides: texlive

Run "equivs-build fake-texlive", and you'll get a .deb you can install
to keep dependencies happy. You can add more names to the "Provides"
line, comma-separated, if you need.

Cheers,

Andrew