Is there any difference between rpm packages used in different distributions like red hat, centOS, openSuse, fedora, pcLinuxOS, mageia, mandriva etc? Can rpm used in one of these distributions be used in other distributions also? I checked on the net and at some places it is mentioned that they are essentially identical, while others say one cannot use rpm of one distribution in another. Thanks for your answers.

Yes.

On mixing repos see for example https://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalRe...s/Repositories


Since we have no examples it's hard to say in what context what was said and the knowledge of those that posted their comments.

I've done it, but the process can be complex. The rpm metadata will contain a list of dependencies, but this won't be a list of actual libraries: it will be a list of the packages on that distro which contain those libraries, and they will be differently named in different distros.

To give you an example, I have one old Windows program which I need, which is very fussy about which version of Wine it will run with. CentOS had an unacceptable one, so I needed an acceptable one from the same year, so that the dependency versions would be the same. I got another distro's rpm and it couldn't install because of unmet dependencies. So I gave the command to install the CentOS version, made a note of its missing dependencies, aborted the install, and installed the dependencies. Then I installed the wine.rpm with the "--no-deps" option. See what I mean? If this computer were bigger and faster, it would have been quicker to compile the source code.

Getting the .src.rpm and compiling it (on a non-Production machine obviously) for the distro + release in question also enables you to satisfy dependencies and address distro-specific paths or scripts (and ideally give back results to the community).

it "can" be done SOMETIMES!!!!

mostly things fonts and icons and themes have no problem
i use the the really COOL Fedora echo-icon-theme on SL6.7

and a few fedora games i have on SL

but for the MOST PART most things are NOT interchangeable

Thank you all. I get the point.