* Leandro Guimarães Faria Corsetti Dutra (leandro@dutra.fastmail.fm) [040216 13:17]: > On Mon, 16 Feb 2004 13:39:00 -0600, Benjamin Sher wrote: > > > can "alien" convert from Fedora Core RPM as well as Red > > Hat RPM? More importantly: Does it make a difference? > > Possibly in policy. As you are violating policy anyway by using RPM, it > shouldn't worsen anything. To the OP: what this means is that no, it doesn't make a difference. Alien simply extracts all of the files from an rpm and repackages them in a deb. Alien doesn't care if that package contains files like /lib/libc.so.6 which, if installed, could completely hose your system. (dpkg might protect you from hosing yourself with that particular example, but I think the point is clear.) So it doesn't matter what distribution your rpm was targetted for; in most cases, it's not debian, and installing it on your debian system will most likely result in a system which is in violation of debian policy. This doesn't necessarily mean anything bad; just that your system isn't really a "clean" debian system anymore, and that should be taken into account when considering any bugs you may experience. I think a better answer to software not available from debian directly is usually to compile and install in /usr/local, rather than resorting to trying to install foreign packages. Luckily, the dependencies required for compiling most software is readily available within deiban, so you can just let debian's superb package management do most of the dirty work for you just by asking it to install the required *-dev packages. good times, Vineet -- http://www.doorstop.net/ -- "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." -- Barry Goldwater
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