Re: Run .deb or .rpm packages

[Vagrant Cascadian <vagrant@debian.org>]

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On 2021-12-12, Efraim Flashner wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 10, 2021 at 10:30:36AM +0100, Hartmut Goebel wrote:
>> Le 8 décembre 2021 14:46:24 GMT-05:00, "André A. Gomes"<andremegafone@gmail.com>  a écrit :
>> 
>> > --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
>> > $ sudo dpkg -i foo-package.deb
>> > dpkg: error: unable to access the dpkg database directory /gnu/store/902w5i1j38r33l6p871dyhng19zj1phk-dpkg-1.20.9/var/lib/dpkg: Read-only file system
>> > --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---
>> > 
>> > Any ideas?  I don't know much about .deb or .rpm.
>> 
>> Beside Julien's objections: There might be legitimate use of installing .deb
>> or .rpm packages and they might even work. E.g. i one wants to install free
>> software provided as a .deb only and at the moment does not have the time to
>> create a package definition for it.
>> 
>> So, "dpkg" and "rpm" should at least work :-)
>> 
>> Regarding the error show above: One would need to add "--localstatedir=/var"
>> to the config flags (not sure whether this would build, then, since most
>> probably "make install" will try to create "/var/lib/dpkg" which will fail
>> in the build container.
>> 
>
> When I packaged dpkg I deliberately didn't "fix" the localstatedir or
> any other flags since Guix doesn't support installing packages from .deb
> archives. Similar to the rpm package it is primarily used for the other
> parts of the package.
>
> Vagrant has said in the past though that Guix's dpkg can be used to
> install packages on Debian based systems.

I don't think I would recommend trying that! It *might* technically work
with some changes to the guix dpkg package, it seems a bit risky; you'd
probably have a "native" dpkg available and I'm not sure I see the
benefit then.

I mostly found it useful to extract (dpkg-deb --extract PACKAGE.deb,
dpkg-deb --control PACKAGE.ded) and inspect .deb packages from Guix
System.

Whenever I need a Debian environment on Guix System I usually just use
debootstrap to create a chroot and work from there.


Thanks everyone for Debianing your Guixs and Guixing your Debians!


live well,
  vagrant

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