[Mageia-discuss] Compability with other packaging-solutions

[Oliver Burger]

Luca Berra <bluca at vodka.it> schrieb am 2010-11-11
> On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 08:09:52AM +0100, Kristoffer Grundström wrote:
> >For instance....... let's say that you find an opensource-program in a
> >repo for another distro (a good example is telegnome).
> 
> there is a tool named alien that can supposedly convert deb packages to
> rpm, the result may vary since debian and mandriva/mageia are laid out
> quite differently.
The problem about this is: Linux uses dynamically linked libraries. So your 
software from another distro won't work if it needs other versions of those 
libs.
It can work without problems even if the libs aren't exactly the same, but 
when there are major changes in the used libs it won't. The better solution is 
to rebuild those packages for the distro you want to use the software on.
Another thing is, using packages from other distros may bring problems in the 
future, when urpmi tries to upgrade the system and it won't be able to resolve 
some dependencies because the version of the third-distro package won't fit the 
requirements of some Mageia package.
If you really do find some software you can't find, I'm sure there will be some 
way of putting a packaging request on the bugzilla.

Oliver