[SOLVED] rpm2targz, deb2targz - dependencies

I have spent the last week wading through large packages, which I can only get as .deb or .rpm, and come with a ton of dependencies.

The debs and rpms have dependency information - "This package depends on a,b,c…z" so apt-get or rpm can grab those as well. Is there any way of recovering information about the required dependencies with deb2targz, rpm2targz, rpm2archive, or alien-pkg-convert? I much prefer slackware, but sometimes the dependency work is just crazy.

unpack the deb with "ar x package.deb". then unpack the control.tar.gz and read the control file. For rpm's use "rpm -qRp package.rpm".

I should also add that personally I am not a fan of those kinds of automated tools for repacking. Deb archives are just "ar" archives with compressed tars inside and rpms are just compressed cpio files with some meta data tack to the front. You can unpack either with normal tools found on on pretty much any Linux system, there is no magic. After extracting files, adjust the extracted files and repackage yourself with makepkg.

P.S. Running strings on an rpm (piped through less), will also let you read the text parts of the rpm meta data and hence dependency information.

In addition to ruario's second post, be warned that I've seen systems get hosed because the rpm or deb had weird permissions and it changed a lot of the filesystem's permissions. When the person used rpm2tgz or deb2tgz, it kept theses weird permissions and then when installed, it hosed permissions on the filesystem. It is almost always better to unpack them and then repack them into a Slackware package using a SlackBuild script (where you can have it easily reset permissions using the templates provided by SBo). You can look at my discord SlackBuild for an example with a deb package.

Thanks ruario & bassmidrigal. Very informative.

(btw, what's a guy from Norway doing with an Irish name like Ruarí?)

So, rpms and debs just use obsolete archiving methods. I Take the warning about file & directory permissions. Debs seem a better way to go. I'll try one, and sniff around it. IME, when source is not around, dependencies abound.

I am British with strong links to both Ireland and Norway.

Originally Posted by business_kid So, rpms and debs just use obsolete archiving methods.

Not obsolete, no. In fact they're probably used more often then .txz packages.
But they are meant for other linux distributions than Slackware and maintain an installed packages database in another form.
A Slackware .txz can contain only one "after install" script (install/doinst.sh), while for instance a rpm can contain up to 4 of them (pre-install, post-install, pre-remove and post-remove).
But, of course, those scripts are written for their respective distributions and are NOT copied into the .txz after a rpm2txz or deb2txz, just the "archive" itself.
Unpacking and creating a package gives you the chance to adapt the whole bit to Slackware.