On Thursday 31 August 2006 13:53, rich wrote:
It brings to mind the question of what requirements a package must meet to be able to run on Suse. How can I tell a non-Suse package will be able to run on Suse (10.1) successfully?
Many times you can just try to install it, and if your machines meet all the pre-requsits it will work.
However I've had to back out more than one RPM because it tried to use things that apparently even the developer didn't know he was using. In defence of the developers who provide this fine distro, it is not
John Andersen wrote: things that the developer disn't know he was using. It is about location, location and location. Location of the installed app ie in usr or somewhere different to what SuSE expects. Location of the dependencies, evenif there aren't any. The RPM file built for Suse knows in what directories to find what it needs. Install another distro RPM that expects to find the dependencies in a different directory to the SuSE standard and you have a SNAFU ie dependant packages are in /home as opposed to the SuSE way of /lib. Rewriting the config file is possible as the source is available but MANY past Windows users, myself included, would not know where to begin in rewiting a .config file so that the none SuSE app works, as it should, with SuSE. hth -- ======================================================================== Currently using SuSE 9.2 Professional with KDE and Mozilla 1.7.2 Linux user # 229959 at http://counter.li.org ========================================================================