On 6/10/07, Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org> wrote:
Alien is very useful if all you have is an .rpm. It can't solve all
possible problems, but it's generally better than using rpm directly
on a Debian system: the main thing that springs to mind for me is that
dpkg silently clobbers files in system directories that it doesn't know
about, and I would assume rpm also does.
This means that if you install a package with rpm, and later a .deb
containing the same files is installed, the package system will replace
the rpm's files with the deb's files, but neither rpm nor dpkg will know
this happened. The effects of this can be pretty dire; using alien
avoids them.
Thank you for explaining. I wasn't actually planning on using .rpm
directly on Debian. Instead, I converted OOo 2.2.0 from .rpm to .deb
using Alien. But then I got warned that even this could harm my system
in unexpected ways and I better use backports (I'm running Etch). So
I removed the .rpm stuff and installed the OOo 2.2.0 backport. It's
running fine now.
Manon.