I got an rpm package which I need to do some changes in it, recopile and reinstall. In Fedora, Mandrake and SuSe, I use rpmbuild but in debian this did not work. I tried dpkg --build ppp.spec but also did not work. What should I do? Can some one help me?

From apt-cache search rpm I see there's a cross-platform package builder called epm. rpm itself is also available, if you can do it with rpm in the other distros I suppose it works as well if you download rpm.

Could you use alien to convert the rpm to a deb?

Thanks for reply. I can use alien with no problem to convert an rpm to deb package. That's not my problem. The issue here is making changes in ppp package. I have installed the src.rpm of that package w/o any problems and made the changes that I need. Now, I need to rebuild that package to an RPM then convert it to deb with alien. When I do rpmbuild, this is what I get:

root@ian:/usr/src/rpm/SPECS# rpmbuild -ba ppp.spec
rpm: To install rpm packages on Debian systems, use alien. See README.Debian.
error: cannot open Packages index using db3 - No such file or directory (2)
error: cannot open rpm database in /var/lib/rpm

I have installed epm, but it seems it is simillar to alien.

The question:

What is the equivelent command to rpmbuild in debian or how can I rebuild a debian package?

Thanks. Here is the solution:

http://www.togaware.com/linux/surviv...ackages0.shtml

Enjoy debian.