Alright folks, new version (1.1, not that the numbers really have any coherent significance atm) is pushed to github. hxka's pull request has been merged in, although at this point more in spirit than in form because I had made tweaks/changes all over the place both before doing the merge and during resolving the merge conflict, when I ended up reimplementing some stuff, for example for greater flexibility, like the command line argument parsing. Still, many thanks to hxka for the initial ideas/implementation. It was very useful.

Anyway, new command line options:
--help/-h (self explanatory)
--section/-s (lets you pick a custom section instead of 'metapackages')
--hard/-H (lets you specify a version number to make a versioned/hard fake, e.g. same package name and a specific version, to meet versioned-dependencies.)

The package name and version number checking is also much more robust now, and I think it strictly matches Debian package guidelines, instead of the prior "you got some invalid characters in the package name, but that's all the checking I'm doing" check from before. The downside is it won't print all the invalid characters out for you like the prior one did.

I will attempt to find the time to throw this in the extras-devel repos shortly. In the meantime, just grab the raw file from the github and it should work fine, as before.

Speaking of 'equivs', I checked it out, and I have nothing against it, but I immediately noticed how many dependencies the stock Debian equivs package has, vs. fkdep. Ironic, given that a big part of me wanting a tool to fake dependencies was to not have to install so many dependencies in the first place.

This is exactly the reason why I find your fkdep so cool. Its "rawness"

Finally uploaded this to the repos! I had the autobuilder do Diablo and Chinook as well as Fremantle, although I can't guarantee that it works the same perfect way out of the box on Maemo 4 the way it does on Maemo 5.

[edit1]But I find it hard to imagine that Maemo 4 would lack the really basic, minimal utilities needed for this to work correctly.[/edit1]

NOTE: new version(s)/changes:

NO MORE automatic installing of .deb file if you run it as root. I know this was convenient, but I think there are several good reasons:
1. Principle of least surprise suggests this is the better way: it can be unexpected if you get used to using it to build packages as non-root, and then suddenly run it as root and have it install the package.
2. User choice (to not immediately install when running fkdep as root) suggests this is better (because you can easily chose to install after, and even though you can immediately uninstall, you can't easily chose to just make the install literally not-have-happened, and if you're using the hard-faking option, you may have just nuked whatever package you were about to fake if it's already installed).
3. Code/interface/program simplicity == good
4. The next best alternative is implementing another command line flag, but it seems better to just roll all "install after making .deb" functionality into another small wrapper script, which is an idea I've expressed before.

Also, I made the command line options parsing a bit more flexible, after noticing that a lot of standard Unix utilities have this flexibility: instead of only allowing either "-o foo" or "--option=foo", it now also handles "--option foo" the same way.

P.S. I think I'm leaning towards SemVer for the versioning scheme. Not set in stone yet, but I'm going with it for now.

Heads up: I fixed a couple of bugs and pushed version 2.0.1 into devel.

Bug 1 (help text): The help text had "\n" at the end of one of the lines, accidentally left over from either when it was initially written as one big argument to printf, or when it was several printf statements, [edit1]instead of one printf statement with several arguments (one per line of help text) like it is now[/edit1].
Bug 2 (.deb packaging): I accidentally had a "prerm" file in there, which wasn't even syntactically correct. I guess a long time ago I thought it would be a great idea to have it automatically UNinstall the fkdep-* packages when fkdep got un-installed. I no longer intended to have it do that, so I forgot all about the prerm file.

I prematurely promoted 2.0.0 to -testing already before noticing this (don't promote packages when sleep-deprived guys; like drinking and driving, just don't do it, it never ends well) - if you're going to use it and/or test it, hold off until 2.0.1 makes its way into -devel and I'm able to promote it to -testing.

Alright, version 2.0.1 is in extras-devel, and is on its way to extras-testing.

I hope you didn't install 2.0.0 from the repos in the brief time it was there, because if you did, dpkg will flail pathetically whenever you try to uninstall it.

If you did install 2.0.0 from the repos, you'll have to make it think it's already uninstalled by manually editing /var/lib/dpkg/status (find "Package: fkdep" in that file, and change the "Status: " line right under that to say "Status: purge ok not-installed" (there's a couple of other valid things to make it say, and I think just the "not-installed" instead of "installed" part might be enough, but that's what I did).

If you can't manage that (though most users of this are power users I imagine, so I don't expect issues), let me know, and I can put together a dummy package which you can install over it, with its own prerm script, which will take over when the installed one fails, and make the uninstall go cleanly.

Now, that said, version 2.0.1 is now in both Maemo 5's and Maemo 4's -devel repos, and I promoted it down from both of those. I am confident this version is basically bug-less, now. It's still making its way into extras-testing for Maemo 5, as soon as it's in there, please go ahead and test/vote on it.