Re: Aptitude wants to remove OpenOffice.org

[bob@proulx.com (Bob Proulx)]

Manon Metten wrote:
> I noticed that you are very alarmed about installing .rpms on a Debian
> system. Although I am NOT planning on doing so, please explain.
> Please also explain "Almost anything is better than installing .rpms
> directly on a dpkg system."

This really becomes the old adage, "The person with one clock knows
the time.  The person with two clocks is never absolutely sure."
Referring to the old days when two mechanical clocks were never able
to be completely in sync with each other.

Programs are rarely completely self-contained these days.  Most of
them use shared libraries.  Many of them make use of other parts of
the system.  This generates a web of dependencies.  Each package
declares that it depends (requires in rpm) other packages.
OpenOffice.org is no exception.  To see a partial set of dependencies
please run the following command.  OpenOffice.org has a lot.

  apt-cache show openoffice.org-core | grep Depends: | tr , "\n"
  ... long list of dependencies not shown ...

Trying to make it so that openoffice.org could be installed cleanly
with rpm on a deb system would be a large task.

The package manager does not check the filesystem when looking to see
if those dependencies are met by files on disk.  Package managers
check their database of installed packages to see if those packages
are installed.

That all works when everything is installed using the same package
management database.  But rpm and dpkg use different databases.  If
you installed something with rpm then it would not be reported as
installed for dpkg and anything that was required by rpm may already
be installed with dpkg but rpm would not have record of it.  For
people using tools such as apt4rpm or yum then rpm might try to
install a package to meet a dependency even though that package might
already be installed on the system with dpkg.  This can really break a
system.

Also because debs follow Debian Policy they have a plan for
interacting with each other.  By contrast I am not aware of any RPM
Policy and therefore .rpm files tend to be less well planned out and
interaction problems even on fully rpm based systems is common.
(Fedora is starting to move toward having a policy in this regard but
I think it is still not mature.)  This plan covers naming, covers
interfaces, etc.

There has been some work done on integrating an rpm front end into
dpkg.  Then both tools would have a shared database.  This would allow
well behaved rpms to be installed directly.  I don't know how far
along that has progressed.  I am pessimistic about the success of that
approach.

Bob