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At the moment I'm playing a bit with alien (for OpenVZ packages on Debian) and was wondering myself about one question for which I was not able to find an answer anywhere. Therefor I thought it might be smart to ask here :)

The question is...
If I convert a .rpm to .deb on a system, how compatible is this .deb package?

What do I mean?
Will the .deb be working on other systems as well or is it per-system, e.g. that on every system the .deb package will be little different?

That i386 and x86_64 are different is clear, so this doesn't need to be answered :)

Examples that would be nice to know are for example:

.deb built on Debian 6 64-bit -> Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit (compatible?)
.deb built on Debian 6 64-bit -> Debian 5 64-bit (compatible?) etc.

Thanks anyone reading this / helping me!

Regards, Michel

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  • OK it seems that they are NOT built per system (but per arch, which is clear).
    – MaddinXx
    Nov 19, 2012 at 20:37

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All that alien does is take the contents of the RPM and rearrange their packaging to turn them into a .deb archive (along with trying to synthesize proper package metadata based on the metadata in the RPM). It doesn't change anything at all about the binaries; it just copies them from the RPM.

Therefore, the binaries installed as part of the .deb package will be just as portable as the binaries in the original RPM. If those binaries will run on the target system, they'll still run when installed via the .deb.

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