Hi Daniel, On 6/10/07, Daniel Burrows <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Alien is very useful if all you have is an .rpm. It can't solve all
possible problems, but it's generally better than using rpm directly on a Debian system: the main thing that springs to mind for me is that dpkg silently clobbers files in system directories that it doesn't know about, and I would assume rpm also does. This means that if you install a package with rpm, and later a .deb containing the same files is installed, the package system will replace the rpm's files with the deb's files, but neither rpm nor dpkg will know this happened. The effects of this can be pretty dire; using alien avoids them.
Thank you for explaining. I wasn't actually planning on using .rpm directly on Debian. Instead, I converted OOo 2.2.0 from .rpm to .deb using Alien. But then I got warned that even this could harm my system in unexpected ways and I better use backports (I'm running Etch). So I removed the .rpm stuff and installed the OOo 2.2.0 backport. It's running fine now. Manon.
