Re: RPM on Debian
On Mon, 19 Apr 1999, Joey Hess wrote:
> 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.
RPM has a nice feature which might be helpful here.
'rpm -qpl packagename.rpm' will list all the files in the package and the
directories into which they will be installed. This is equivalent to
'dpkg -c'.
Bob
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