On Thu Feb 21, 2008 at 13:10:58 -0000, Vic wrote:
> > Sure, unless you want to use them on Fedora Core, Centos, Mandrake,
> > etc. Releasing an .rpm for one distro is easy. Releasing one for
> > N distributions is doomed to failure.
>
> Cobblers. I build on Whitebox, and the .rpms run on RHEL, Fedora, CentOs,
> Suse and Mandrake.
I'd be impressed if that were the case. I've seen multiple people
fail to release a working .rpm file for project including multiple
libraries and binaries.
(Primarily because you cannot express dependencies in .rpm files
in a portable cross-distribution manner.)
> > alien is a hack. It works a lot of the time, but there is no
> > sane way to convert from .rpm -> .deb and expect it to work.
>
> That certainly appears to be true. So what do I do with the library files
> where the Policy Manual prevents me from creating a source package without
> some very inappropriate dibbling? What do I do when the dependencies
> creating by building on my .deb system mean the binary won't run on my
> RHEL system?
Surely the fact that a .deb contains binaries which don't run upon
the non-Debian host isn't a problem? I'm a little confused.
Earlier you said there was a free download available, if you point
me/us at it I would be happy to wrap it in a minimal Debian package,
if that is useful? At the very least having a concrete idea of
your problems would be useful in trying to help you.
> But you *could* create RPMs fairly easily by getting yourself a working
> RPM environment. That you don't is your choice - and one to which you are
> fully entitled - but it says nothing about the packaging system.
I guess that is true. I can install a Xen guest, or similar, but
the point I was trying to make was that to package for an RPM
distribution pretty much requires that I have a running RPM-based
distribution. (And similarly for Debian). Most times a chroot()
is sufficient though.
> If you installed a working RPM system and it prevented you from building
> RPMs, it would be broken. But that's not the case you're arguing.
No, it wasn't.
> Familiarity is certainly a part of this - it's getting easier every time I
> release - but it's not the whole of it. It does appear to be impossible to
> build the source package I want without re-writing the tools (and even
> then I'd have packages that don't meet "policy").
Without a specific example it seems hard to imagine how that could be
the case. Ultimately a Debian package is a pair of:
* data.tar.gz
-> Containing files to be unzipped into your / partition
* control.tar.gz
-> Containing some meta-information.
Ignoring policies that don't seem relevant is fine. But suggesting
that you can't create a package of random binaries without modifying
tools is hard to understand.
Steve
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