On Mon, 19 Apr 1999, Joey Hess wrote: > 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.
RPM has a nice feature which might be helpful here. 'rpm -qpl packagename.rpm' will list all the files in the package and the directories into which they will be installed. This is equivalent to 'dpkg -c'. Bob