Package alien

Patrice Dumas pertusus at free.fr
Tue Dec 11 09:14:19 UTC 2007


On Mon, Dec 10, 2007 at 09:55:14PM -0600, King InuYasha wrote:
> Not all people accidentally using dpkg would be stupid. Perhaps they are
> used to a Debian based system, yadda yadda yadda... 

Being used to something isn't an excuse for doing something wrong that 
could have been avoided by understanding what one is doing (and nobody
is stupid in my opinion, but some actions are stupid).

> Anyways, upstream could
> theoretically be used if a patch was submitted to detect platforms to enable
> and disable functionality. 

That could be interesting, indeed. Though detecting the platform is
certainly not the way to go. What would be relevant would be to detect a
rpm database in the installation root. But then you should want to
modify autoconf/automake such that a generated makefile doesn't install 
in rpm managed directories when a rpm database is detected (or we are in
fedora).

> For instance, on Debian, a dpkg binary would
> function as the full package manager, with apt as repo manager. On a Fedora

apt is completely different from dpkg (and the apt in fedora knows .rpm,
but not .deb). In fedora the repo manager may be smart, yum, apt and
certainly other that I don't know (not to mention that urpmi would
certainly work fine).

> machine, dpkg's platform checking would figure out it is fedora and
> automatically initialize alien functionality, or just fail with an error
> stating that if you want to use debian packages on this platform, use alien
> to convert it to the native package format of the platform.

My guess is that alien doesn't need dpkg at all, but needs dpkg-deb
(which even seems to be a different binary). Still not a reason to
cripple dpkg.

--
Pat




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