Re: RPM and db3
On Sun, Feb 09, 2003 at 12:39:46PM -0500, Paul M Foster wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 09, 2003 at 07:31:06PM +1100, Rob Weir wrote:
> > GOOD $DEITY. Do not ever, ever, EVER use rpm on a Debian system. If
> > you really, truly cannot get a .deb or tarball of the package, then use
> > alien to convert the RPM to a .deb and install that. Even if you try to
> > force RPM to work, you're going to confuse dpkg mightily ;)
>
> I had the same problem, and I searched the archives back for six months,
> and this is about the answer given every time.
>
> I gotta tell ya, folks, this is a lame answer. You've deliberately
> included a _broken_ package in Debian, which is just dumb for the most
> technically superior Linux distro there is.
Believe me, including an rpm that could install packages would be worse.
No rpm would ever be able to install anyway, because the package
database wouldn't be suitable for it: we have a libc6 package with
different versions to Red Hat's glibc package, for example. It just
wouldn't work at all, and it's not practical to make it work. The reason
rpm's in the distribution is so that you can inspect and extract RPM
packages, not so that you can install them.
Rob gave you a working answer: use alien. That's the documented [1] and
supported way to install RPMs on a Debian system, and it will actually
work, whereas trying to install an RPM on a system built in a completely
different way from the one where the RPM was built has no chance of ever
working. What's with the rant and the abuse in return?
[1] http://www.debian.org/doc/FAQ/ch-compat.en.html#s-otherpackages
Cheers,
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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