[wplug] RPM, Deb, Tgz and package management

[Luquilla Hughes]

Hey all and especially Art,
    This post is about the installfest on Sat. and talking with Art about 
package managers and differences between deb and rpm. I believe that I made 
a mistake (or mislead) in what I had said to you on Sat. and for some reason 
remembered it on the drive home so I would just like to correct that. Deb 
and Rpm packages although they are not interchangable they can be converted 
with the use of a tool. I.e. you can install debian and use RPM's and that 
goes vice versa. So it doesn't matter which distro you install the different 
packages are available for you with a slight increase in sysadmin overhead.

A quick search on google of rpm2deb, deb2rpm revealed alien. this will allow 
conversion of packages between rpm-deb-tgz which covers the distros of 
RedHat, Mandrake, Debian, Slackware. and I believe that stampede amoung 
others may also work.

I hope that this makes sense if anybody would like clarify or has used Alien 
please speak up.

-matt

applicable url's
http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/contrib/noarch/noarch/alien-6.53-3.noarch.html
http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/RPM-for-Unix-HOWTO-8.html

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