Do some distributions' RPMs work across distributions better than others?

Ask Fedora
, ,
1

I’d like to install PCLinuxOS’s Stremio RPM [1] [2] on Fedora.

I’ve been advised, to success, many times that despite slight inherent differences between Zypper and DNF5 and their respective package repositories, RPMs created for openSUSE (at least, Tumbleweed) generally work on Fedora. Red Hat Linux and CentOS’s definitely appear to.

However, does this extend to more niche distributions? Being a lay person, IDK what kind of standardisation there is to the RPM format, or whether that’s sufficient.

Yes, I realise that there’s a Flatpak package. However, debugging and DE adherence can be easier and more effective outside of the sandbox.

  1. pkgs.org/download/stremio#distro-187 ↩︎

  2. pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php/topic,154338.msg1324119.html?PHPSESSID=qjeht4g7vh167f3k2sgfvb606f#msg1324119 ↩︎

2

To my understanding, an RPM is pretty much just an archive, like all other distro package types.

The main thing that matters it that the dependency names are consistent across the distributions and the age of the dependencies.

In general, a package built on old dependencies and old glibc has a decent chance of working on a modern distro version provided its dependencies are available. However, running a binary that uses modern dependencies and modern glibc typically will not work on older distro versions. It’s a matter of backwards compatibility vs forwards compatibility.

1 Like