[Slackbuilds-users] Converting other packages to .tgz

[Jeremy Hansen]

On Mon, Jun 1, 2020, 11:54 AM Rich Shepard <rshepard at appl-ecosys.com> wrote:

> On Tue, 2 Jun 2020, Klaatu wrote:
>
> > When I use a .deb file as source, it's usually because the latest RPM is
> > Fedora and requires a very recent libc or libc++ (or similar) that my
> > Slackware box doesn't have by default. The .deb packages I find seem to
> be
> > more conservative, whether for Debian or Ubuntu LTS.
> >
> > My first response to that is to look for an RPM from CentOS or RHEL,
> which
> > also tend to be conservative, but their repos just aren't as well stocked
> > as Debian's, so .deb is often the best and easiest solution.
>
> klaatu/JK,
>
> Thank you both for your thoughts but that still leaves half my question
> unanswered. Using .deb sources rather than .rpm sources tends to be more
> compatible with slackware, so why isn't there a deb2tgz?
>

There are actually deb2tgz scripts, they just aren't included in stock
Slackware (in fact, there's one on SBo).

https://slackbuilds.org/repository/14.2/misc/deb2tgz/

As others have said, it may just be that Pat never needed it and rpm2tgz is
there for historical reasons (the current version has been in since 13.37,
and was upgraded back in 2010, mainly to add support for txz packages).
That version from 13.37 was rebuilt during the mass rebuild of 2018.

However, I refuse to use these programs. There's no guarantee they will
work and sometimes files/folders need a little massaging to get into the
right location on Slackware. But sometimes the worst can happen and it can
break your system.

https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/usr-permissions-changing-for-converted-packages-4175617360/

This user had permissions on his filesystem changed. I'm thinking the
rpm2tgz script doesn't sanitize the permissions of the resulting packages,
but I'm too lazy to check (maybe the user threw a flag in there when
converting that broke everything... I don't know).

Personally, I feel much safer using a SlackBuild that's on SBo (meaning
it's been tested to work by others) that's repackaging the deb/rpm or make
my own SlackBuild and test it before installing.

Jeremy

>
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