Packaging and installation

[Peter Makholm]

Jeff Tranter <jefft at corel.com> writes:

> How technically hard would it be for Debian to use
> the RPM package format without throwing out the rest
> of their packaging architecture?

Can you take a random Suse-produced and install it on a Mandrake
system without any problem? (My frinds in the RPM-world says no).

Before that is posible I see no absolut need for Debian to change
their native package system. We allready have alien to install rpm's
so it shouldn't be a problem to support LSB-compliant software
packaged as rpm's. (If the software is LSB-compliant I pressume that
depencies shouldn't be the big problem).


As I understands it, Debian uses installations scripts a lot more than
the RPM-based distributions. This would not make it technically
impossible to change to RPM but a lot harder and in some places
non-trivial.

I think I some time ago almost had the design for an spec2debian which
would at most suffer for some non-trivial depencies problems. I could
try implement it and see how bad it would be. The other way would be
harder, I think I deduced, but I don't remember the details.


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