GNU/Linux RPMs

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Thu, 2008-02-21 at 09:32 +0100, Wolfram Wadepohl wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> there are different RPM packages for fedora, suse and redhat. So far so 
> good. What package should i choose for debian? Is it necessary to build 
> from source?
There is no easy answer to these questions.

Basically there exist 2 different ways:
1. Building from source.

This isn't necessarily easy, requires some amount of work, time and
knowledge - The devil is in the details ;)

2. Reusing binary rpms.
Here you'd have to find out which of the supported distros is compatible
to the flavor of Debian you are using. It's impossible for me to tell
from remote.

In general, original Debian distros tend to be much more conservative
than RH (and way more conservative than Fedora and OpenSuSE). 
I.e chances to find a suiteable distro increase the older the rpm-based
distro rpms are being built against.

Ubuntu tends to be "on par" with OpenSuSE and Fedora, i.e. chances are
rpms from them might also be usable for Ubuntu.

Wrt. age, the order is approximately:
RHEL4 < RHEL5 ~ Fedora 6 < Fedora 7 < Fedora 8 (< Fedora 9 ~ RHEL6)
The SuSE packages are independent and largely incompatible to the
RH/Fedora release chains. 


Once you've found out, you need to find a way to unpackage the rpms.

You could either try using "alien" or try to manually unpackage the rpms
(using rpm2cpio). In the past, Debian users reported good results using
alien.


Finally, there is another option (Hint, hint) - ATM, rtems.org not
shipping Debian/Ubuntu packages is merely a matter of lack of
resources ;)

Ralf