[wplug] RPM, Deb, Tgz and package management

[harrold at sage.che.pitt.edu]

Sometime in March Luquilla Hughes assaulted keyboard and produced...

|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

on the subject of deb's and rpms. the apt4rpm stuff works pretty well for me,
and might be worth your time if you want the apt functionality under an rpm
based distro.

apt4rpm.sourceforge.net 
-- 
john
"have algorithm-will travel"