We have already talked and explained in other articles in operation the famous alien, a tool for converting packages from one type to another, to transform RPM into DEB, or tgz, etc. Various formats that the app supports and between which we can convert. The problem with alien is that it is not very reliable and the converted packages may not work properly when we convert it, keep in mind that distributions tend to have notable differences such as the directory tree, the location or syntax of the configuration files of the ones these packages depend on, or name the packages they depend on differently. Therefore we can find a program that does not work properly or directly does not work at all.
Well, together with alien we are going to present here another tool, although somewhat more specific, it is debtap. With it you cannot transform between different formats as with alien, but we can transform specific DEB packages from Debian distributions and derivatives to work on our Arch Linux distribution or derived from it. The name of the tool comes from DEB To Arch Package, which gives an idea of what it can do.
We can install the deptap tool using various methods that we already know from Arch Linux, such as one of these three commands:
pacaur -S debtap packer -S debtap yaourt -S debtap
Once we have it installed in Arch or other distributions derived from it, we can proceed to use it. By the way, you will also need other additional packages, although these are probably already installed: bash, binutils, pkgfile and fakeroot. Now to make it work we need to execute the following even command create and update the database:
sudo debtap -u
Y to convert a .deb package in an Arch-style package:
debtap nombre_del_paquete.deb
And ready…