Michael K. Edwards wrote: > > No, Debian packages just work, if dpkg allows you to install them on > > your system. > > > > Unless, now, they happen to be built by someone running the other > > distribution. > > I can think of several ways that this could happen, but I haven't > actually seen any of them yet. Would you mind adducing some examples?
I haven't bothered to find them, but given what I'm hearing about the glibc incompatabilities in this thread, I'm sure they exist, right? > I agree with Joey that mucking with the actual packaging system (or > even a very popular helper kit) is one of the more fork-like things > that a derivative distro can do. But this is certainly an area where > sarge+hoary is no worse than woody+sid-after-twelve-months was; many > backported source packages were broken in gross or subtle ways if you > didn't start by building yourself an up-to-date debhelper. However, debhelper is excessively careful to preserve backwards compatability and when a package's build dependencies don't express its need for a newer debhelper, we file a bug report. > Here I can disagree from experience. RPM hell is being unable to > reproduce your vendor's binaries as a starting point for subsequent > modifications (with or without third-party help), and it was already > gaping wide as of Red Hat 5.2. That is not how I've heard most users define the term. It's certianly a valid problem. > Ubuntu is the first Debian derivative not to be more or less a random > sid snapshot plus the deriver's pet hacks. Well random sid/testing/stable snapshots. With the exception of most CDDs; cf skolelinux, debian-edu, etc. -- see shy jo
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