building ms-office.deb (rpm, tgz)

Rod Smith rodsmith at speaker.rodsbooks.com
Wed Feb 14 13:42:27 CST 2001


In article <3a8aa908$0$551$45beb828 at newscene.com>,
	Jon Griffiths <jon_p_griffiths at keep_your_ads_to_yourself.yahoo.com> writes:
> Hi,
> 
>> -> Feedback on the general idea, feasibility.

One potential problem is that, AFAIK, Microsoft releases its products in
its own CAB data file format. You'd need some sort of extractor for
this, or maybe run a Windows CAB extractor under WINE. I don't know of
any open source CAB extractor, but I'd love to be proven wrong.

> I think a script would be better than a .deb or rpm though; it would run on 
> all distributions for one thing, and could be hacked alot easier. More 
> people know Perl/sh scripting than know how to build packages...

I expect that an RPM or Debian package to do this would consist mainly
of one or more scripts, so there'd be little difference, really, in
terms of doing the real work. If done properly, the scripts could be
run standalone, so those who don't want to deal with RPMs or Debian
packages could do it that way. An RPM or Debian package would make for
easy uninstallation, since it could track installed files. I don't know
how important that would be -- how many files does Office drop in
places that might be awkward or inconvenient from a WINE point of view?
Certainly if everything's in one easily-excised directory, there's not
much advantage to an RPM or Debian package, but if Office replaces many
standard Windows/WINE files, an RPM or Debian package begins to look
appealing.

-- 
Rod Smith, rodsmith at rodsbooks.com
http://www.rodsbooks.com
Author of books on Linux & multi-OS configuration



More information about the wine-users mailing list