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ed7a39e3d1
users/groups in their preinst, and which alien therefore cannot ship the
files with proper ownerships in the .deb. In this case alien will now
insert appropriate chown commands into the postinst script of the
converted package.
* That only works when converting rpm to deb, not the other way around,
for now.
* Removed the cpio directory permissions fixup code, which was probably
broken, and is obsolete since I get directory perms from the rpm now.
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 your distribution (eg, Red Hat) provides a rpm-build package, you will need it as well to generate rpms. 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 Solaris users can find pkg's of much of the above software, at http://mah.everybody.org/hacks/os/solaris/ , thanks to Mark A. Hershberger <mah@everybody.org>. 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 (or had) something in Corel linux that uses alien. Please report any bugs in alien to the author: Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org>