I find alien to be a very useful tool for converting and creating packages, however I have run into one problem: architecture-dependent files in TGZ archives. Because all TGZ files are treated as "noarch" the rpmbuild command will fail. I can two-step around this problem (assuming the objects in the package were compiled for the same architecture as I am running on) with:
alien -r -g package.tgz;
cd package;
rpmbuild -bb package.spec --build-root=pwd
but ideally I would be able to do this all with alien. It would be nice to have a command-line parameter to change the target architecture used for rpmbuild. --Dan
If you are the original designer of alien, do you think, because of its experimental situation at the moment, alien will once - though perhaps very difficult - have a possibility - and possible with other programs - to convert an exe file into a deb or rpm file?
No. --Joey
When trying to convert Novell iFolder (http://sourceforge.net/projects/ifolder/) package to deb (according to http://www.x2b4.com/howto/how-to-install-ifolder-on-ubuntu-server/), but on Debian lenny - I'm getting messages like this:
syn:~# alien --scripts ifolder3-enterprise-3.8.0.9328.1-3.1.i586.rpm
warning: ifolder3-enterprise-3.8.0.9328.1-3.1.i586.rpm: Header V3 DSA signature:NOKEY, key ID 3a9159a7
warning: ifolder3-enterprise-3.8.0.9328.1-3.1.i586.rpm: Header V3 DSA signature:NOKEY, key ID 3a9159a7
Unpacking of 'ifolder3-enterprise-3.8.0.9328.1-3.1.i586.rpm' failed at /usr/share/perl5/Alien/Package/Rpm.pm line 155.
What am I doing wrong ?
rpm2cpio seems to be failing. Perhaps you need a newer version? If you pass the
--veryverboseoption to alien it will show you any error output from rpm2cpio, which should help. --Joey