Stephen, am Thu, May 12, 2011 at 09:53:39PM -0400 hast du folgendes geschrieben: > Well, as Bill Bitner often says, "It depends." It depends on what you mean > by an ISV. Obviously that means "Independent Software Vendor". But let's > take a specific example. Let's suppose that you want to run IBM's DB2 > Universal Database for Linux. That's a closed-source, proprietary, object- > code-only product. The last time I checked, they did not offer a version > packaged for Debian. You see, Red Hat and Suse are "IBM Business Partners". > And they both use the Red Hat Package Management format (.rpm format). > So IBM's binary packages are in .rpm format. > > Debian uses the Debian Package Management format (.deb format). Although > it is theoretically possible, in some cases, to install a .rpm package to > a Debian system (using "alien" for example), it's probably not something you > want to do. And in this specific case, it may not even be possible. If you > try to install an s390x-architecture rpm package on Debian, you're likely > to see the install fail with an architecture conflict (s390 vs s390x). > Plus, the .rpm package was compiled with the C compiler that was current in > the intended target distribution, which may or may not work with the C run- > time libraries in Debian, etc. In short, only install a binary package > that has specifically been packaged for Debian. If you have the source > code, you can compile it yourself, if need be. But lots of luck getting > the source code for DB2 from IBM. ;-) usually repacking IBM's RPMs as debs isn't a problem. I do that for TSM on i386, amd64 and s390 and it works just fine. (That said, not with alien, RPM would work too.) Most ISV software conforms to LSB and thus they ship everything that's not guranteed to be present in the base system. So as long as all this stuff is available in 64bit form we ought to be safe if ISVs are compliant. If something needs fixing please tell us. (That said: non-proprietary software is more fun, too.) Kind regards, Philipp Kern -- .''`. Philipp Kern Debian Developer : :' : http://philkern.de Stable Release Manager `. `' xmpp:phil@0x539.de Wanna-Build Admin `- finger pkern/key@db.debian.org
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