Github user njayaram2 commented on the issue:
https://github.com/apache/madlib/pull/314
@fmcquillan99 It would require alien only if you want to build an rpm on
Ubuntu. If you just want to build regular .deb package, we wouldn't need alien.
And alien is neither bundled with MADlib, nor is it automatically
downloaded. At the moment, a developers who want to build an rpm on Ubuntu will
have to set up their Ubuntu environment with alien.---
