Ralf Mardorf wrote: > Richard wrote: > > Bob Proulx wrote: > > > I have used alien and been into the guts of it and after really > > > wanting it to work I was always disappointed. It sounds like a cool > > > idea. I wanted it to work. But it just can't work perfectly because > > > packages from different systems have different policies. The tool > > > can't be smart enough to understand the policies of both systems and > > > do the right thing in a sentient way. It is the policy differences > > > that case the problems. That doesn't mean that there are some good > > > examples where it works fine though. > > Using alien I got the 32-bit lightscribe driver, 32-bit SimpleLabeler > and Lacie's 32-bit 4l running on my 64-bit testing. That's great! Happy it worked for you. I didn't say it didn't ever work. I said that *I* always ran into cases where it didn't work due to policy differences between the distributions. But without looking at the components you mentioned I will dare to say that I am sure that the alien installed packages are still not in any way up to the install quality levels expected from a native Debian package. I bet that if I looked at the way that alien ended up installing them on a system that I wouldn't be happy with it. > Building packages with checkinstall instead of installing software by > make install works for RPM and DEB based systems. > Hence compiling FLOSS might be smarter than using RPM for Debian. Often very true. Often it is easier to build and install to /usr/local initially and then clean that up later when a nice packaged version shows up. For many tools and utilities that works out great. However for components such as GNOME that are large and somewhat involved that is easier said than done. It isn't too terribly hard to build it. Especially if you start with the packaged versions and work from there. But it isn't completely trivial either. > Sometimes checkinstall don't build a package, e.g. if scons is used, > anyway, usually it does what it should do, you hardly will find exotic > scons stuff and similar. I take it that you had a bad experience with a scons package? I haven't used scons but if it didn't build then there would probably be help available for it. Bob
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