> 
> I don't see it as a weakness. By choosing a distro as opposed to 
rolling
> your own, you are removing the burden of testing/validation/packaging
> from yourself and letting others handle it. This is a good thing and
> allows you to focus on using the OS as opposed to just keeping the OS 
> up and running. The downside is that you will run into cases where
> a package here or there that you really want is not supported yet
> and hence the above build disaster. At that point you can choose to
> build it yourself and decide how far you are willing to go. I'm
> personally not willing to go too far.  If it gets to the point that I 
> have to start tearing my distro apart and possibly breaking 
dependencies, 
> I often just wait for an official package from the distro or some 
other 
> kind soul who does it unless it's an absolutely needed package.
> 
> ~Deepak
> 


Just out of curiousity do you know if alien can turn tar.gz files into 
deb files that can then be built and installed with dpkg?

Ren