Marek Habersack wrote:
>
> On Sun, 28 Mar 1999, George Bonser wrote:
>
> > > you imagine you get all those spiffy packages in Debian from? It's from
> > > hundreds of people EDITING EVERYTHING so that you can just type dpkg -i
> > > package.deb and enjoy the way it works...
> > >
> > > marek
> >
> > No, Marek, you reread my original. Joe Blow gets some package designed for
> > Red Hat. How is he going to install that on his Debian system. He learns
> > he can convert it to a tarball ... whats that? Ok, so he does it. It
> > still won't install. Hmmm, looks like I have to call a $200/hr Unix
> > consultant to see IF I can get this stuff installed on my system.
> >
> > The point being, do NOT assume that the person trying to load the orignial
> > Red Hat package even knows what a Makefile is.
> If he manages to understand how to convert an rpm to a tarball, he will surely
> understand how to use alien to make a .deb package, and will be smart enough
> to understand the process.
Marek, I think George's point is Joe Blow doesn't *have* to
understand using alien to convert a .rpm to a .deb, alien does
everything for him. The problem starts when the newly created
.deb still fails to work because of assumptions about the layout
of the distro made by the creators of the .rpm.
I've said this before and I'll say it again here: alien does
*NOT* solve the problem of an absence of a 'standard' for Linux
distros.
P.S. Does anyone here know if there has ever been any 'official'
discussion between Debian and Red Hat about the incompatibilities
in /etc?
--
Ed C.
