Can dpkg or apt be installed on Arch Linux?

Question

I know this is probably a dumb question, but I'm kinda curious. And if it is possible, then how?

Answer 1

Yes, dpkg is an AUR package for a long time. Yet, it is not meant to install .deb packages. Instead it is meant to build .deb packages on Arch (i.e. packages that then can be installed on Debian, Mint, Ubuntu, etc).

On the other hand, installing a .deb package on Arch is not hard. Let's take slack (a chat program that has a .deb package) as an example. In the PKGBUID of this AUR package you can see a simple script that performs the installation:

bsdtar -O -xf "slack-desktop-${pkgver}"*.deb data.tar.xz | bsdtar -C "$pkgdir" -xJf -

# Permission fix
find "${pkgdir}" -type d -exec chmod 755 {} +

# Remove all unnecessary stuff
rm -rf "${pkgdir}/etc"
rm -rf "${pkgdir}/usr/share/lintian"
rm -rf "${pkgdir}/usr/share/doc"

# Move license
install -dm755 ${pkgdir}/usr/share/licenses/${pkgname}
mv ${pkgdir}/usr/lib/slack/LICENSE ${pkgdir}/usr/share/licenses/${pkgname}
ln -s /usr/share/licenses/${pkgname}/LICENSE ${pkgdir}/usr/lib/slack/LICENSE

And yes, that is the best way to install .deb packages on Arch: converting them to AUR packages.

References:

• Create packages for other distributions