From: Colm MacCárthaigh (colmmacc at domain redbrick.dcu.ie)
Date: Tue 10 Sep 2002 - 13:09:04 IST
On Tue, Sep 10, 2002 at 12:39:42PM +0100, kevin lyda wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 10, 2002 at 12:27:10PM +0100, Colm MacCarthaigh wrote:
> > On Tue, Sep 10, 2002 at 09:25:46PM +1200, Andrew Kemmy wrote:
> > > Summary: "alien -c package.rpm ; dpkg -i package.deb" works sometimes.
> > This isnt exactly a revelation. Alien is a kludge. Avoid using it,
> > ever.
> > [...]
>
> wow. helpful stuff there. i'm sure less 133t debian users will come up
> with better answers,
Debian won't solve the problems of pants software. The only way
you can get around it is to package unpackaged things yourself,
from scratch, don't even think about touching alien.
If you have to extract the RPM's into a chroot to do it, then
that's the only way for that. The dependencies need to be
sanity checked and ideally things should be modified to
be in agreement with Debian policy and other things found at:
http://www.debian.org/doc/maint-guide/
After you have some debs that you've built from scratch, and
apt repository is the way to go, even if it's only for one
machine building a repository is a good idea, because it
needs to keep in sync with however you upgrade. If you stick
to policy you can get away with packages being usable across
a wide range of releases.
In work we've recently finished doing a similar process, where
everything we have on the linux boxes that was not packaged
now is. Some are on sid, some are on woody, some are on sarge
, one is on potato. They all work fine because we were very
careful about how dependencies were written and all of the
install scripts were done properly from scratch and we
integrated with debconf .. etc. Mark everything the software
touches as a configfile .. etc.
Licensing issues shouldnt affect you as long as you don't
distribute the debs.
All in all though if software takes that much effort to
get going and isng opensource, I wouldnt bother using it.
because support is now going to count for nothing.
I would definitely advise against ever using alien, ever.
-- colmmacc at domain redbrick.dcu.ie PubKey: colmmacc+pgp at domain redbrick.dcu.ie Web: http://devnull.redbrick.dcu.ie/
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