i'm new to the list so please feel free to flog me if this question is dumb or is in the archives already (my searching hasn't turned anything up). is there anything like alien to convert between .deb and fbsd packages? i have managed to build (with a little bit of tweaking) some of our internal .debs in the process of trying to get our hosting system working on bsd as well as debian.... if i copy the debian source package, tweak the rules and / or makefiles a bit i can usually run gmake and gmake install and get everything to install. obviously, having done that once it would be nice to be able to convert this into a binary package for bsd.... it would also be cool to be able to turn a debian package into a freebsd package without so much tweaking but i'm not greedy :>
my main interest in this project is because i'd love to be able to use *bsd within our work system (debian), although i don't know if that will ever fully happen without systemV init scripts (one of the few things besides apt i miss on *bsd). on another note, do people think that there's enough resources (person-wise) to support developing an entirely new set of packages? it seems that some method of converting ports to a debianized format compatible with apt would be nice.... debian is already fairly cautious / slow with releasing new stuff, and it seems that it would be difficult to keep up with (presumably) considerately less people involved. since the ports use standard makefiles, and the patches are included, would it be hard to use these to build the packages? (i'm sure this may have been discussed before, so i apologize if that's the case). w
