Urban Gabor wrote: > someone has mentioned in these lists that installing alien packages from > .rpm can be dangerous. I'd like to know more about it, so please write > some pro's and con's.
Installing alien packages from rpm can be dangerous if the converted rpm contains files that are critical to the system, like libc or init. dpkg has allow overwrite on by default and will overwrite the files provided by debian by the ones in the rpm. As the man page says: Alien does not account for differences in configuration between different linux distributions. So don't use it to replace something essential like sysvinit. You could destroy your system by doing so. In general, if you can't uninstall the package without breaking your system, don't try to replace it with an alien version. -- see shy jo, alien maintainer