I switched from Debian to CentOS because I had the choice between an old 32 bits Debian 4.0 or a brand new 64 bits CentOS 5.3. And I have some scripts that use the great start-stop-daemon tool, which isn’t available on CentOS.

The easiest way to solve this problem is to get dpkg from Debian and then try to compile it. It’s likely that it will fail because libselinux (and it’s subsidiary library libsepol) won’t be registered in the pkgconfig dir. But we don’t really care as we only need start-stop-daemon, not dpkg.

$ wget http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/d/dpkg/dpkg_1.14.25.tar.gz
$ tar -xf dpkg_1.14.25.tar.gz
$ cd dpkg-1.14.25/
$ ./configure >/dev/null
configure: WARNING: x86_64 not found in cputable
configure: WARNING: linux-gnu not found in ostable
Package libselinux was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `libselinux.pc'
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
No package 'libselinux' found
configure: WARNING: no curses library found
$ make >/dev/null
processarc.o: In function `process_archive':
/root/dpkg-1.14.25/src/processarc.c:166: warning: the use of `tmpnam' is dangerous, better use `mkstemp'
archives.o: In function `tarobject':
/root/dpkg-1.14.25/src/archives.c:634: undefined reference to `matchpathcon'
/root/dpkg-1.14.25/src/archives.c:640: undefined reference to `setfscreatecon'
/root/dpkg-1.14.25/src/archives.c:802: undefined reference to `setfscreatecon'
/root/dpkg-1.14.25/src/archives.c:804: undefined reference to `freecon'
/root/dpkg-1.14.25/src/archives.c:826: undefined reference to `setfscreatecon'
/root/dpkg-1.14.25/src/archives.c:618: undefined reference to `is_selinux_enabled'
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make[2]: *** [dpkg] Error 1
make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make: *** [all] Error 2
$ cd utils
$ make install
gcc -std=gnu99 -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I.. -DLOCALEDIR=\"/usr/local/share/locale\" -idirafter ../libcompat -I../lib    -g -O2 -MT start-stop-daemon.o -MD -MP -MF .deps/start-stop-daemon.Tpo -c -o start-stop-daemon.o start-stop-daemon.c
mv -f .deps/start-stop-daemon.Tpo .deps/start-stop-daemon.Po
gcc -std=gnu99  -g -O2  -Wl,-O1 -o start-stop-daemon start-stop-daemon.o ../libcompat/libcompat.a
make[1]: Entering directory `/root/dpkg-1.14.25/utils'
test -z "/usr/local/sbin" || /bin/mkdir -p "/usr/local/sbin"
  /usr/bin/install -c 'start-stop-daemon' '/usr/local/sbin/start-stop-daemon'
make[1]: Nothing to be done for `install-data-am'.
make[1]: Leaving directory `/root/dpkg-1.14.25/utils'

Even if it doesn’t look so good, it should have installed the start-stop-daemon software.