Re: Mozilla successes.

[Jason White <jasonw ariel its unimelb edu au>]

Tom and Esther Ward writes:
 > Jason writes:
 > > It would be good if the developers could keep providing tar files
 > > containing the sources as they have now started to do. I still need to
 > > find time (perhaps over the summer) to play with Gnopernicus, at which
 > > point I hope to be able to download and test the latest Mozilla
 > > accessibility release. I run Debian, so rpm packages won't be of any
 > > help.
 > 
 > Hi, Jason.
 > Isn't it possible that Debian users could use alien or something like that
 > to convert rpms to Debian packages?

It's possible, but as I understand the situation, the reason why they
generally don't use it is that rpm doesn't contain all of the
information needed to create a reliable Debian package. There are
technical reasons why Debian doesn't use rpm. While it is also
possible to have multiple package managers installed I would much
prefer to avoid it: I want Debian to have control over everything in
the /usr hierarchy (/usr/bin /usr/lib /usr/share etc.) and for locally
installed software not controlled by the Debian packaging system to
reside under /usr/local.

I also happen to have Debian's Mozilla packages already installed; I
don't want to remove these as members of my family sometimes use the
system and require Mozilla. The ideal solution would be to have Debian
packages of a version of Mozilla that supports all the latest access
features. Failing that, a source distribution that installs under
/usr/local without interfering with the existing Mozilla installation
would work.