RPM compatability

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Sat, Feb 02, 2008 at 09:51:49PM -0500, Paul King wrote:
> Hello
> 
> I have a bit of a problem with unpacking some rpm files. These are old
> rpms (circa 1997) of WordPerfect 6. I wanted to turn the archives into
> debs and install manually. I first ran alien which would do this, but
> there were errors, and in the attempt to debug the perl RPM library the
> error came from, I found the command that I wanted anyway, which was:
> 
>         rpm2cpio wp-6.0-1.i386.rpm | (cd x ; cpio --extract
>         	--make-directories --no-absolute-filenames
>         	--preserve-modification-time)
>         
> But the error was:
> 
>         argument is not an RPM package
>         cpio: premature end of archive
> 
> Well, the argument *was* an RPM as you can see above, but these are the
> same errors as seen under alien.
> 
> Anyone have any advice regarding extracting these files from the
> archive?

Perhaps alien doesn't know old rpm formats.  I think they are on version
4 or 5 by now of the rpm format.  That one might be version 1 or 2.

Of course you may also have a corrupt file.

What do these say:
file wp-6.0-1.i386.rpm
rpm -qpl wp-6.0-1.i386.rpm

--
Len Sorensen
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