Bombing of Dresden (was Plea for help: The detriment of using Microsoft products)

[Mike Bilow]

There is really no point to installing Debian package management tools on
Red Hat.  First, large sections of the filesystem, such as /usr/bin, are
considered to be under the exclusive control of the package manager, and
running two package managers on one system is going to cause collisions.  
Second, the Debian package management system provides for all sorts of
capabilities that are not present on a Red Hat system, or which depend
upon Debian Policy, such as automatic determination at upgrade of whether
the user has edited a configuration file or is using the default installed
with the package.  Third, since Debian handles automatic dependency
resolution, what you would end up with if you run its tools on Red Hat is
the package manager cascading an installation of Debian over Red Hat.

If you want to install the occasional Debian package onto Red Hat, use the
alien utility and fix up the damage manually.  If you find that you are
constantly installing Debian packages onto Red Hat, then you need to ask
yourself why you are not running Debian in the first place.

-- Mike


On 2000-05-17 at 12:44 -0400, Derek Martin wrote:

> This is probably because they're .deb packages rather than .rpm files.
> You CAN get debian's package manager to run on redhat, and then (assuming
> that's the problem) the goodies should work fine.  Usually though, there
> are also .rpms available and you can just get those.  


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