Arch Linux

iStealth

Member

Registered: 2007-10-10

Posts: 3

Is there any pitfalls of using .deb packages

Hi All,

I switched to Arch a few days ago, and I missed some packages that I had in Kubuntu (for example kcpuload, dekorator, and qstardict). I found how to compile qstardict using the PKGBUILD but I got errors (and I had to manually specify -I/usr/include/glib-2.0/ and some other things, come on, it should be done easier). Then I stopped with that, downloaded .deb's for kcpuload and qstardict from ubuntu's repo, unpacked them to /usr/bin ...etc. and everything worked.

So my question is - what's the problem in doing that ? what's the potential danger? I know that some packages won't work like that. But with those 2 simple programs everything is fine. I'm still missing "dekorator", but I'm using kdemod, and as I understood, in dekorator, there is dependence on original kde-libs.

Cheers,

Allan

Pacman

From: Brisbane, AU

Registered: 2007-06-09

Posts: 11,487

Website

Re: Is there any pitfalls of using .deb packages

Problems are dependency resolution and not having files managed by pacman.  If you don't mind that then it is fine. I would have unpacked them in opt.

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PGP Key: F99FFE0FEAE999BD | I develop pacman - buy me a drink!

tomk

Forum Fellow

From: Ireland

Registered: 2004-07-21

Posts: 9,839

Re: Is there any pitfalls of using .deb packages

come on, it should be done easier

If you have a problem with an AUR package, leave a comment for the maintainer describing what happened. Better still, find the fix, and tell the maintainer about it.

dekorator is also in the AUR - it's called kdedecor-dekorator. It's currently orphaned, so you could adopt and maintain it if you like.

And if you get that far, you could then go on to create your own Arch package for kcpuload - all relevant details are in the wiki.

iStealth

Member

Registered: 2007-10-10

Posts: 3

Re: Is there any pitfalls of using .deb packages

Thanks for the response. I'm not sure I would have the time to make some input in the development.

I just tried to compile qstardict and dekorator on my second box with Arch 2007.08-1 and everything went flawlessly. Yesterday I installed Arch 2007.08-2 on my laptop and this one causes troubles. Obviously there are some packages missing, but I did the same installation (as on my desktop a week ago) - the whole "base" and than xorg and kdebade. The only reason is that with the older version of Arch ( I thing because the repo structure has been changed)  at that time I was asked to update something like linux-utils to linux-utils-ng ( don't remember correctly) and I did it, and there were some exstra packages installed.

Besides, with the new Arch 2007.2 my usb flash drives are not automatically mounted ( my hdds are) and with the previous Arch everything was OK, but that's another thing that I have to check.

Cheers,

bruenig

Member

Registered: 2007-05-20

Posts: 175

Re: Is there any pitfalls of using .deb packages

Besides, with the new Arch 2007.2 my usb flash drives are not automatically mounted ( my hdds are) and with the previous Arch everything was OK, but that's another thing that I have to check.

Do you mean automatically when you plug them in? Like with hal or...?

tankmcp

Member

From: Tulsa, OK

Registered: 2007-09-17

Posts: 54

Re: Is there any pitfalls of using .deb packages

iStealth,
I stand arch not to have versions, just snapshots of what is in the repos.  As soon as you update, (pacman -Syu) you are running the same version on both machines. 

The only difference that I've noticed is a slight glitch in the 2007.8-1 kernel install (found solution in forums quickly.)