Re: Red Hat Package Manager debianized
On Mon, 28 Oct 1996, Bruce Perens wrote:
bruce >Christoph,
bruce >
bruce >A package converter sounds like a good selling point for Debian.
bruce >
bruce >We can't always convert packages and redistribute them due to
bruce >their commercial terms - for example Accellerated X. However, we can
bruce >distribute a patch file that can be applied to the commercial package
bruce >after it has been extracted and before it is repackaged that makes a
bruce >"perfect" Debian package out of it. If you can make your package conversion
bruce >tool take patch input as an option and perform the rest of the process
bruce >automaticaly, the end user might be able to employ it that way.
bruce >
bruce >We can also keep these patch files in our sources archive so that we can
bruce >track new versions of foreign packages as they are released.
How could these patches work? They could probably be patched in at the
point where the (semi)sourcecodepackage is complete.
Right now this would be possible in the following way assuming you have
package XYZ:
1. Run tgzinstall or rpminstall
rpminstall -k -d XYZ
This results in a package ready to be packed up into a .deb file.
(-k keep intermediate version, -d dont install using dpkg)
2. Patch it
patch <XYZ.patch
3. Build the debian package
cd XYZ-Version
debian/rules binary
Note:
The patching cannot do anything about the binaries. The only thing that it
could do is rewrite control files or scripts in the package. To access the
files in the package it has to refer to XYZ-Version/debian/tmp/filename.
I could have tgzinstall or rpminstall take an options like
rpminstall -p<patchfile> XYZ
and it would then convert/patch/install the package using dpkg (same
process as described above)
Is that along the lines of your thinking?
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