The long term fix for Debian and Slackware style packaging is
to add native support for building these packages. Unfortunately,
that is a large chunk of work I don't have time for right now.
That said it would be nice to have at least basic packages for
these distributions.
As a quick short/medium term solution I've settled on using alien
to convert the RPM packages to DEB or TGZ style packages. The
build system has been updated with the following build targets
which will first build RPM packages and then convert them as
needed to the target package type:
make rpm: Create .rpm packages
make deb: Create .deb packages
make tgz: Create .tgz packages
make pkg: Create the right package type for your distribution
The solution comes with lot of caveats and your mileage may vary.
But basically the big limitations are that the resulting packages:
1) Will not have the correct dependency information.
2) Will not include the kernel version in the release.
3) Will not handle all differences between distributions.
But the resulting packages should be easy to install and remove
from your system and take care of running 'depmod -a' and such.
As I said at the top this is not the right long term solution.
If any of the upstream distribution maintainers want to jump in
and help do this right for their distribution I'd love the help.
Brian Behlendorf