I think, this cannot be done. Yes debian has a good and working apt-get system. Yes, the number of .deb is very large. Yes, the have good ideas (menu and others) But we can't witch to deb package: -> We have to repackage all rpm -> debian is very badly i18n! -> install system is a big pain for beginner -> If we use the preexistent stable packages, we are going back to MDK-5.2! Only one thing who can be changer in mdk for the moment, is urpmi. it is to slow, compared to apt-get, and hdlists are too large. (synthesis doesn't permit to search for files)
For my part, I use debian for server sometimes, or slackware, because I do the job for dependencies myself. For the desktop, I only install mdk -> easy of use for end users who don't know a lot about hacking. Emmanuel Le Dimanche 24 F�vrier 2002 03:28, Timothy R. Butler a �crit : > Hi everyone, > I just had a kind of "waaay out there" idea I thought I would toss on > here. Mandrake's urpmi mimicks the concept of apt-get, the menu system > driving Mandrake is Debian's, and many other things are done in a Debianish > way. So my thought is this, what about making Mandrake 9.0 or something > like that Debian-based? Here are the benefits as I see them: > > 1.) While RPM is great, dpkg seems to offer some really wonderful > features. It's also a lot easier to make packages, and simple to convert > them (I guess you could alias the command rpm to "alien --to-deb," > actually). > > 2.) Urpmi too is very nice, but a Mandrake Debian setup would have a > major benefit - apt-get could be configured first to get Mandrake packages, > and if one didn't exist for a particular program, it could revert "woody" > or "sid" packages. > > 3.) Mandrake could be the first to offer offer an i586-optimized > Debian-based distro. > > 4.) This would further distinguish MDK from the "others" (RedHat and > SuSE). > > 5.) Finally, since Mandrake uses Debian-like ideas, and even uses the > Debian menu system, I would think it would be simple (relatively speaking) > to make such a move. > > I know it seems like this is a space that is already take with Libranet > and soon Xandros, but it seems to me the low-level Debian utilities > combined with the excellent interface of Mandrake could be truly a "killer > app." > > Any thoughts? > > -Tim
