Seeking consensus on dh

Posted Jun 6, 2019 7:51 UTC (Thu) by jond (subscriber, #37669)
In reply to: Seeking consensus on dh by mirabilos
Parent article: Seeking consensus on dh

Most people's complaints about RPM are at the layer below what OP is complaining about: the horrid binary format, strange uncompressed key/value store in the metadata, and all that stuff; OP is talking about the complexity of the source level, and having dh, debhelper, cdbs, etc. *is* a problem. There are some things that are nicer about the RPM source workflow (not everything, but some things)

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Seeking consensus on dh

Posted Jun 6, 2019 9:17 UTC (Thu) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (3 responses)

So could one hack up a tool to build a dpkg from an rpm spec file?

Seeking consensus on dh

Posted Jun 6, 2019 10:06 UTC (Thu) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link] (1 responses)

Sure you could, but given the impedance mismatch (RPM specs include some things Debian's don't, and vice versa; embedded scripts contain Redhat/RPM-isms, etc.) it'd make more sense to build a debian/ subdirectory from it.

The other way would be to process the RPM spec with, well, RPM, and the re-package the resulting RPM binary package to a .deb archive. This is reasonably simple to do, and flexible enough when you allow the user to edit the intermediate result.

I leave the question of whether getting RPM to run on Debian systems would be easier than writing a spec converter to whoever tries both and compares the effort involved. ;-)

Seeking consensus on dh

Posted Jun 6, 2019 13:10 UTC (Thu) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]

RPM has been packaged as part of Debian since time immemorial, but as we know that's not really the point.

Seeking consensus on dh

Posted Jun 7, 2019 10:54 UTC (Fri) by Conan_Kudo (subscriber, #103240) [Link]

No need to hack up one, it already exists: https://github.com/ascherer/debbuild

I use it for building Debian packages all the time. It doesn't fully support everything a spec file has, but it's got a good chunk of it already.