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0aa7015f37
alien now supports converting to and from Solaris "pkg" packages (which
are really SysV packages). You probably need to run it on Solaris for this
to work, though. This brings the number of possible conversions alien can
do up from 12 to a monstrous 20!
* Mark also had to patch Deb.pm a bit so the by-hand deb extraction could
work with solaris's ar and tar.
* Documented the EMAIL environment variable. Closes: #116754
* Threw out a lot of old patches, circa 1999. Probably useless today.
* When converting to debs, move files as follows, if possible, for better
FHS compliance:
/usr/man => /usr/share/man
/usr/info => /usr/share/info
/usr/doc' => /usr/share/doc
* Also moves files as follows, to avoid possibly confusing dpkg with
installing over symlinks (?). Closes: #40012
/usr/bin/X11 should be /usr/X11R6/bin
/usr/lib/X11 should be /usr/X11R6/lib/X11
/usr/include/X11 should be /usr/X11R6/include/X11
* Reverse these moves in the cleantree stage.
* Debian users who have installed alien packages in the past may want to
re-convert and reinstall them, to take advantage of the new FHS
conversions.
Please read alien's man page for general documentation. Getting alien: The newest versions of alien are available at the alien home page; drop by http://kitenet.net/programs/alien/ On metalab and its mirrors, alien is located in the pub/Linux/utils/scripts/ directory. You can also get rpm or deb packages of alien: deb: ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/unstable/binary-all/admin/alien_*.deb rpm: ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/contrib/noarch/alien-*.rpm Other things you'll need: To use alien, you will need several other programs. Alien is a perl program, and requires perl version 5.004 or greater. If you use slackware, make sure you get perl 5.004, the perl 5.003 in slackware does not work with alien! To convert packages to or from rpms, you need the Red Hat Package Manager; get it from Red Hat's ftp site. If you want to convert packages into debian packages, you will need the dpkg, dpkg-dev, and debhelper (version 3 or above) packages, which are available on the Debian ftp site. To convert to/from stampede packages, you will need bzip2, get it from http://sourceware.cygnus.com/bzip2/index.html Attention, Slackware, Red Hat, and Stampede users: Bruce S. Babcock <babcock@math.psu.edu> has put together an "alien-extra" package of all the extra files you need to use alien on a Red Hat or Slackware system. (Debian systems automatically have all required files.) The Slackware version is at ftp://ykbsb2.yk.psu.edu/pub/alien/alien-extra.tgz The RedHat version is at ftp://ykbsb2.yk.psu.edu/pub/alien/alien-extra.rpm The Stampede version is at ftp://ykbsb2.yk.psu.edu/pub/alien/alien-extra.slp Note: Alien is really designed to be used to convert from alien file formats to the packaging format used by the distribution you run it on. Of course, it can also convert from your distribution's native format to alien formats, or from one alien format to another. Do be warned though, that if these latter types of conversions are done, the generated packages may have incorrect dependancy information. This is known to be true if you convert a rpm into a deb on a Red Hat system, for example. Even with alien-extra installed, dpkg will be unable to properly calculate library dependancies for the deb it is creating, and you will get a package without any library dependancies. Programs that use alien: I know of one program that acts as a frontend to alien - kpackviewer is a package viewer that can convert between package formats by using alien. Its homepage is at http://www.momentus.com.br/users/hook/kpackviewer.html Corel also appears to have something in Corel linux that uses alien. Please report any bugs in alien to the author: Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org>