Re: apt (and/or dselect) with other dists (ie. RH, suse, etc)

[Peter Allen <P.Allen@pallen.dabsol.co.uk>]

Frisco Rose wrote:
> 
> Howdy all,
> 
> I have been lurkin' for quite some time to see if anybody had thought of
> this one. I believe apt currently only handles .deb's but that there was
> room left open for the addition of other pkg formats. Anyway my question
> is this, Has anyone been able to point the apt source list at another
> distribution and *auto-magically* been able to install any package they
> wished?
> 
> I think that it might be benificial to have this option open for people
> imagrating into debian so that they would be able to install some of their
> favorite flavors, so long as the package was reasonably compatable (ie.
> not going to muck about in the libs and such ).
> 
> Frisco Rose     REU Student
> rosef@nemo.physics.ncsu.edu
> 
> --
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First most programs are available in debs.  Those that aren't probably
aren't for
a reason.  (i.e. new so nobody has packaged them yet, distribution
specific etc.)
Second, if you __need__ to use a package from a different distribution
you have
got to use the experimental package alien, which trys to convert the
package
to the different directory structure debian uses.  This can handle all
major
distribution types.

			Peter Allen