Clarifications regarding Red Hat + Slackware Packages
I get lots of e-mail regarding the rpm package and the debmake package.
Instead of responding individually here is a clarification of the
confusing issues:
1. RPM was debianized as a resource for some other things I wanted to do
and does not have a purpose on its own. RPM is a way to access Red Hat
Package information and contains most importantly the library necessary to
manipulate RPM packages.
2. There is a new release of the rpm packages containing warnings all over
the place to not use it directly but instead use debmake's rpminstall.
3. rpminstall for Red Hat packages and tgzinstall for Slackware packages
are part of the debmake package since they are basically a revision of the
deb-make tool. Both depend on "debstd" and a library of customizable
scripts.
The process of converting Slackware and Red Hat packages to be installed
using dpkg works the following way:
A. Information is extracted from the name of the package and the package
itself.
B. The same thing that deb-make does is going on. Control files are
customized and something like a debian source package is generated from
the binary.
C. The binary contents of the foreign package are decompressed into
debian/tmp. A this point the situation is like a sourcepackage
after a successful compile
D. Conversion of installation scripts (works only for Slackware packages
right now) to debian scripts.
E. "debian/rules binary" is run. The prototype rules file calls debmake
which will perform compression, checking of library dependencies for
all ELF binaries etc.
The result is a .deb package that will hopefully install correctly using
dpkg.
This process is not perfect especially since the layout of the filesystem
that a package depends on might differ. But since the FSSTND it should
be close.
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