Am 08. Oct, 2001 schwätzte Nathan England so:

> stop releasing tarballs or source.  Instead only releasing rpm, and
> srpm.  Which really screws me.  I don't pay a whole lot of attention to
> debian, but I haven't been seeing as much debian packaging either.  

You can install an SRPM. One of the ingredients to such things is supposed
to be a pristine tarball as gleaned from the author/maintainer of the
upstream package. Same as for source debs.

debs can be opened with normal *NIX commands. I think ar and a couple of
other things are all that's needed. I recently saw a thread about wanting to
move to something else, but it was brought up that ar is a common tool and
the debian socail contract requires the ability to open debian packages with
normal utils.

Can RPMs be opened with common *NIX tools as well?

ciao,

der.hans
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