Untz: Results of the App Installer meeting, and some thoughts on cross-distro collaboration

Posted Jan 26, 2011 18:32 UTC (Wed) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458)
In reply to: Untz: Results of the App Installer meeting, and some thoughts on cross-distro collaboration by skvidal
Parent article: Untz: Results of the App Installer meeting, and some thoughts on cross-distro collaboration

There are deeper differences than just RPM vs dpkg. For example, SUSE packages (while also RPM) couldn't be installed on Fedora because the division of e.g. library packages were wildly different, and the package names didn't match up (for resolving dependencies), and often the location and names of the configuration files was different. Even among Red Hat derived distributions (like Mandrake and Fedora) it wasn't easy, as they used different library versions and compiler flags. The safest bet was to get the source RPM for a foreign distribution, dissect that one to create a native binary RPM (perhaps by hacking the patches or updates from the foreign one into to native source package). The big advantage of dpkg is that all the dpkg based distributions track Debian rather closely.