ChadDavis wrote: > I'm doing some software development that uses RPM packages. I would like > to have RPM installed on my debian system for trivial and development only > usage. In other words, I don't really plan to manage my system with it at > all; i just want to use it for my dev purposes. > > My question is whether this is a problem. Will it somehow corrupt my deb > system to simply install RPM and use it to play with the odd rpm package? Feel free to install rpm and to use it to build rpm packages. Having rpm installed on your system for building rpm packages will in no way affect your use of dpkg and Debian for your system. It is only the installation using rpm that is problematic. (I have tried 'alien' and found it clever but still lacking. It is trying to do an impossible task so I don't blame it. But I don't recommend it.) For casual use what you are suggesting should work fine. You haven't said how serious you need to be for doing this development. But if you are researching build dependencies for example then there will be differences between dpkg systems and rpm systems. For more serious use where you are trying to replicate an environment then I suggest setting up a chroot. Setting up a Debian chroot is very easy. http://wiki.debian.org/chroot documents much of it using debootstrap. But bootstrapping a rpm system is more difficult. Setting up a chroot for a foreign system (RHEL, SuSE, others) depends upon how easy it is to set up the foreign system. The Linux kernel will be shared with Debian but then the userland will be only that target system. Within limits of Linux compatibility that works well for Debian hosting the system. For RHEL/CentOS, SuSE, others I tend to install a system on some random machine and then simply make a copy of the entire system over to a /srv/chroot/rhel-5-chroot/ directory. Then chroot into it and use it to do software development on a foreign system but within the Debian machine. Bob
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