how to tell apt about "private" installs

[gratefulfrog]

(previously posted by at thread 163326, wrong forum.. sorry)

I am doing a lot of compiling and installing software that is not available at the Ubuntu repositories, or if it is available, the version offered is defective or out of date.

Can anyone tell me how to inform apt of these installations so that it doesn't overwrite my versions with packages that it installs as dependencies?

An example of this is ffmpeg. The Ubuntu version is out of date and defective on my AMD64 platform. I unistalled the Ubuntu package, then downloaded the current cvs snapshot, built and installed it for my platform. It works perfectly! But, now, apt (synaptic) won't let me install software that depends on ffmpeg! so I am stuck!

:???:

[dewey]

Try packaging it into a .deb file,
$sudo alien -d <packagenamehere>.tar.gz
and installing it using
$sudo dpkg -i <packagenamehere>.deb
That should allow dpkg and apt to realize it's installed.

[crane]

That should allow dpkg and apt to realize it's installed.

I installed wine and wine tools from a .deb file. Now every time I update I get a message stating that those to packages can't be updated.

[jodef]

I installed wine and wine tools from a .deb file. Now every time I update I get a message stating that those to packages can't be updated.That seems to be an unfortunate side effect of going that route I installed Mplayer using a deb package and get the same message from synaptic.