On Thu, Mar 15, 2007 at 10:58:10PM +0100, Joe Hart wrote: > > According to Wine HQ, there are no packages for Debian, only Ubuntu > because the maintainer only runs Ubuntu. The packages are not > compatible with Debian because "Debian changed the package format", > which means you either need to compile the source or use the package on > one of the Debian mirrors, which is usually a bit behind the packages on > Wine HQ. > That is just plain ignorance on the part of the person who made that statement. The package format has not changed. It would be stupid for Ubuntu to do something like that, since all package management tools (apt, dpkg, etc) would need updating to deal with a new format. > Something makes me wonder if someone at wine has things backwards. > > One of the things (as I stated a few weeks ago) that drove me away from > Ubuntu was the incompatibility of .deb files between Ubuntu and Debian. > I really would like to know who changed what because I see with > Ubuntu's gaining popularity, more developers are making Ubuntu .deb > files and not Debian .deb files and we're going to run into a .deb-hell > if it continues. Of course I am speaking of third-party repositories. > The problem is more with dependencies than with anything else. As I said, the format is the same. Complaining that an Ubuntu .deb package doesn't work on Debian is like complaining that an Etch .deb doesn't work on Sarge. Over time, as things diverge, it is more likely that packages won't fit across branches. The same is true with Debian and Ubuntu. Now, it is really not hard to build package for both Ubuntu and Debian. In fact, it is no harder than building packages for Sid and Sarge. Tools like sbuild, pbuilder and chroot can be used to great advantage here. I hear that there are some Debian developers whose primary/only real platform is Ubuntu and that they package using pbuilder chroots. Generally, this is considered bad practice for a Debian developer since that means that the package received no testing on Debian, but it can be done. So, to sum it up, the reason that some upstream developers provide Ubuntu but not Debian packages is because they either don't know about tools like pbuilder or are just lazy. Regards, -Roberto -- Roberto C. Sanchez http://people.connexer.com/~roberto http://www.connexer.com
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