3 ms·

I knew suse used rpm packages, but I always thought they were their own... good to know they are putting in the work to distance themselves from the IBM mess.

mst 3y ago
They are, their distro is their own - this is them announcing a RHEL fork as well as their in-house distro. You'll find SUSE Linux Enterprise in quite a few places in Europe but their penetration in the US has always been kinda pants, so providing a compatible alternative to RHEL will hopefully be a net win for them commercialy as well as a net win for the community.
jzb 3y ago
Yes, they used the RPM format with their own tool (Zypper instead of DNF/Yum), but packages weren’t (necessarily) compatible with Fedora/RHEL as far as dependencies and such. But SUSE isn’t just a package of Red Hat.
- krylon 3y ago
  I have seen independent projects provide rpms that are supposed to work on both RedHat/Fedora and SLES/openSUSE, with some caveats as to what versions of each are supported/tested for.
  - jzb 3y ago
    Sure. Really depends on, well, the dependencies. The rpm command shipped with all those distributions should be compatible with the format of any recently created package. But you can run into snags if you have a dependency that doesn't exist on the target system or its repos, or if the packages are named differently, the pre- and post-install commands have assumptions about the system that aren't true on the target distro, etc. But if all the package exists for is to drop a few binaries on the system, it can be fine. Especially for things like proprietary software that's going to just dump a bunch of stuff into, say, /opt and will only break if the kernel or glibc are spectacularly old or too new, etc. Sometimes you can even get away with using "alien" or similar to convert Debs to RPMs if it's only packaged as a Debian package. Sometimes.
    - krylon 3y ago
      He he, I tried using alien a looong time ago, without success. In retrospect, I was young and naive, only had a rather vague idea of what I was doing. So I can't say for sure if it was alien's fault or if I was doing something stupid.

mst 3y ago

They are, their distro is their own - this is them announcing a RHEL fork as well as their in-house distro. You'll find SUSE Linux Enterprise in quite a few places in Europe but their penetration in the US has always been kinda pants, so providing a compatible alternative to RHEL will hopefully be a net win for them commercialy as well as a net win for the community.

jzb 3y ago

Yes, they used the RPM format with their own tool (Zypper instead of DNF/Yum), but packages weren’t (necessarily) compatible with Fedora/RHEL as far as dependencies and such. But SUSE isn’t just a package of Red Hat.

krylon 3y ago
I have seen independent projects provide rpms that are supposed to work on both RedHat/Fedora and SLES/openSUSE, with some caveats as to what versions of each are supported/tested for.
- jzb 3y ago
  Sure. Really depends on, well, the dependencies. The rpm command shipped with all those distributions should be compatible with the format of any recently created package. But you can run into snags if you have a dependency that doesn't exist on the target system or its repos, or if the packages are named differently, the pre- and post-install commands have assumptions about the system that aren't true on the target distro, etc. But if all the package exists for is to drop a few binaries on the system, it can be fine. Especially for things like proprietary software that's going to just dump a bunch of stuff into, say, /opt and will only break if the kernel or glibc are spectacularly old or too new, etc. Sometimes you can even get away with using "alien" or similar to convert Debs to RPMs if it's only packaged as a Debian package. Sometimes.
  - krylon 3y ago
    He he, I tried using alien a looong time ago, without success. In retrospect, I was young and naive, only had a rather vague idea of what I was doing. So I can't say for sure if it was alien's fault or if I was doing something stupid.