On Sunday 15 May 2005 12:01, Hylton Conacher (ZR1HPC) wrote:
Thanks to all for the extended response. Basically we can say as SuSians that whilst it may be possible to install other distro RPM's on our system, or even Debian pkgs via Alien, the end result could be a VERY big mess as each distro would install the package in its own place thinking that other apps/dependencies are in certain places when in actual fact they may not be.
I disagree that it would be a very big mess. Most packages should install nicely and run. dependencies and apps usually don't have to be in a particular place, that's what paths are for. You might have problems with KDE apps and other things that have a hard coded path to configuration files (run a KDE app in suse and it will expect to find config files in /etc/opt/kde3, while a red hat app will install it elsewhere) but for most things it should work fine.
So, we have ruled out using other's RPMs/Pkgs but what about compiling those packages from source into a SuSE RPM and then installing it?
Sure, that usually works fine, as long as you have all the development libraries installed that you need to build it. You may have to tweak the spec file a bit though, to change hard coded paths like --prefix
Surely Linux drivers/modules could be handled the same way ie Doesn't open source mean the source code is available?
In a way. It means the people who have access to the binaries also have access to the source and can do certain things with it without asking permission or paying for it.
Is the RedCarpet app a partial solution to graphically compiling and installing source code from ANY Linux distro?
Nope. At least not yet. It is primarily a tool for distributing rpms that have already been compiled. The compiling part has to be done elsewhere