Re: RPM on Debian

[Joey Hess <joey@kitenet.net>]

Urban Gabor wrote:
> someone has mentioned in these lists that installing alien packages from
> .rpm can be dangerous. I'd like to know more about it, so please write
> some pro's and con's.

Installing alien packages from rpm can be dangerous if the converted rpm
contains files that are critical to the system, like libc or init. dpkg has
allow overwrite on by default and will overwrite the files provided by
debian by the ones in the rpm. As the man page says:

       Alien does not account for differences in configuration between
       different linux distributions. So don't use it to replace something
       essential like sysvinit.  You could destroy your system by doing so.
       In general, if you can't uninstall the package without breaking your
       system, don't try to replace it with an alien version.

-- 
see shy jo, alien maintainer