For what it's worth, this was a terrible lede for this email. And
I couldn't help it, my inner prankster insisted :)
having worked extensively with both package managers, I can
sincerely
tell you both are ugly as hell, but rpm is less ugly than dpkg.
Yes, I'm not saying that rpm is perfect, but at least I can wrap my
head around the tooling, the installation process (in a broad sense)
and the tools built on top like yum/dnf or mock.
The range of tools from dpkg to sbuild/pdebuild make little sense to
me, even after gaining significant experience because of $DAYJOB.
Thankfully, I don't need to go into the reasons why, because this
is
not actually about switching to dpkg and its completely terrible
system.
Apologies on behalf of my inner prankster :)
If all you wanted was the rest of the tooling in so you can build
Debian packages in Fedora, that's really not a problem. I made an
apt-dpkg package a while ago and worked with APT upstream to make it
build and have the tests work (mostly) on Fedora a couple of years
ago. I imported it into COPR so you can see it:
https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/ngompa/apt-dpkg/build/860086/
Instead of renaming the apt package to apt-rpm, we can introduce the
apt-dpkg package that conflicts with apt for your purposes.
But I've been bit by "dnf install apt" in the past and I think we
should stick to upstream naming.
I wish we could have the rpm backend integrated into the Debian
upstream apt, but someone needs to drive that effort, and no one
really cares anymore. It hasn't happened in the past due to
frustrations with working with Debian upstream, and now it's diverged
so much that they are separate upstreams. My understanding is that the
current upstream developers are interested in an rpm backend, but they
don't want to do any effort to make it happen.
Also, you can build debs using RPM spec files[1], if you're aware
enough to handle the differences. :)
[1]:
https://github.com/ascherer/debbuild
I'm not aware, and that probably wouldn't work for $DAYJOB.
Thanks for stepping up as a reviewer!
Dridi