Package alien

[Patrice Dumas]

On Thu, Dec 06, 2007 at 12:50:25PM -0900, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> On Dec 5, 2007 3:51 PM, King InuYasha <ngompa13 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Though, will dpkg and the like be purposely crippled on Fedora like
> > rpm is on Debian systems? It probably would be a good idea to patch
> > dpkg and stuff to make sure they don't work as standard packagers, but
> > rather just helpers to alien, as RPM does on a Debian system. We want
> > to avoid the possibility of package jumbling.....
> 
> I would certainly concur with this.  Without making a judgment as to
> the value of having alien or other alternative packaging tools in the
> repository.. I would agree that if we are going to be putting dpkg and
> friends into the repository that they come configured by default to
> only act as helpers for using Fedora as a (re)packaging host.
> Enabling functionality beyond that should be relatively difficult to

I don't think that we should do anything special with dpgk. Just
recompile it as is from upstream. If users are dumb and use dpkg to
install packages it is their responsibility. Just like when they do
./configure --prefix=/use --sysconfdir=/etc && make && make install
Or use CPAN. Our responsibility is integration, not being smart for 
dumb users.

> enable if not disabled entirely at buildtime.  There maybe some rather
> clever unorthodox ways to make use of a fully capable dpkg in other
> ways, but I don't want users accidental stumbling into those
> situations just because they installed dpkg and followed a google'd
> recipe article to have dpkg replace rpm on their Fedora system.

I can't see what is wrong with having 'dpkg replace rpm on their Fedora
system' if it works and it is what the user intends to do.

The target for dpkg are not casual users, and casual users won't use it
anyway. In %description, I put

  dpkg and dselect will certainly be non-functional on a rpm-based system
  because packages dependencies will likely be unmet.

It may admitedly be enhanced, to say something like

  dpkg and dselect will certainly be non-functional on a rpm-based system
  because packages dependencies will likely be unmet, and in any case 
  you are likely to trash your system if you install packages using
  dpkg.

--
Pat