On Sun, 28 Mar 1999, Brian Servis wrote: > >> You are NEVER going to find a SRPM of HP FireHunter, or any other > >> commercial software pre-packaged for Red Hat. > > Well, such software won't make it into Debian then... I guess... > > > > Correct. Maybe in non-free if the company will let Debian redistribute > it but that is pretty rare. Yes, it is... Here we hit another problem: how to make Debian more attractive for commercial vendors without sacrificing it's pure GNU nature?
> But if it is only available in .rpm format and designed to work on a Red > Hat system and has the Red Hat init structure, or file system, hard > coded into it, then everyone who is running a distro that is not Red Hat > is screwed. The alien package tries to do its best to convert .rpm's to > .deb's for file install locations. But if the program has hardcoded file > structure in the binary or scripts then the effort of converting the > .rpm to a .deb is useless because the program will not run unless it > finds the files in the places that it expects it. That's right. One, very inelegant, solution would be to add an init script to the deb package that would create a required set of symlinks to make the debian system compatible with the RH one. But first - it pollutes the file system, second - well, it makes Debian lose in some sense... Other solution I can think of, more wasteful in terms of space, but more elegant, would be to create a set of wrapper scripts or programs that'd allow to run the application in question in a chrooted evironment simulating the RH file system layout. Requires a bit of effort, but IMO it could work... > I agree that there there has to be a standard used by ALL Linux distros > so that commercial vendors do not have to worry about which distro to > be compatible with. Agreed, but there should be NO new standard... marek