Rajesh Fowkar forced the electrons to say:
> Today just to try mahogany I downloaded mahogany.deb file, since rpm file
> was not available on the site thinking that using alien I will be able to
> convert this deb file to rpm format.
Even I have been doing some experiments with .deb files. I downloaded
one .deb (actually, mutt_1.2.5-4.deb) and unpacked it, trying to figure
out what the packaging method actually does (I am on RedHat).
Here are my findings. This method might work:
.deb files are actually ar(1) archives. You can get the individual files
out by ar x <.deb filename>. What I got were the following files:
control.tar.gz
data.tar.gz
debian-binary
debian-binary is just the debian packaging format version number
(I think). The files you require are in the other two tar archives.
Unpack the control.tar.gz and you will find the scripts to run to
install the package. Similar to rpm spec file's %pre, %post, %preun
and %postun sections, you will find four files, preinst, postinst,
prerm and postrm. Look through the preinst script and try to adapt it
to your system. There usually are debian specific stuff there, like
install-docs etc. Run the preinst script (or adapted version of it),
then you can _usually_ do a cd /; tar zxf <path to data.tar.gz> to
install the package. After you are through, run the postinst program,
after adapting it to your system just like the preinst script.
Of the remaining two files, conffiles is used to mark files which
are configuration information for the package. Similar to the %config
directive in the rpm spec file's %files section. control is information
about the package, and corresponds to the tags in the spec file (the
stuff that comes up when you do an rpm -qi).
I don't know if there are other files, mutt being a simple package. But
I guess generally the observations herein can be assumed true for all
debian packages. If there are dependency problems, then nothing can help
you (dependencies are listed in the file control).
Binand
PS: Standard disclaimers apply.
--
#define l/* Binand Raj S. <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> */".%\"-\"("
#define s/* Ambition: To write sendmail.cf from scratch */abs(abs(i)-5)
main(i,j){for(i=-5;i<6;i++){for(j=0;j<35-s;j++,putchar(32));putchar(s[l]^
108);for(j=0;j<2*s-1;j++,putchar(32));s&&putchar(s[l]^108);putchar(10);}}
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