Using alien to create a .deb

[Cameron Horsburgh]

Hi folks,

I've been experimenting with the alien package to install Lilypond on my
Debian unstable box. Being somewhat old fashioned I prefer to install my
software via dpkg/apt rather than the autopackage route!

I downloaded the RPM from the website, ran alien over it, and installed
the resulting .deb file. Everything seems to work okay, and I've
compiled a few scores with no significant issues.

I have two questions:

1) Does anyone with any knowledge of the internals of Lilypond deb and
RPM packages have any idea where alien might introduce any subtle problems?

2) Can anyone suggest a score somewhere that I could use to 'stress
test' my installation? There may be some sort of regression test that
will test that all my dependencies are properly looked after and some of
the more exotic stuff still works.

If everything works the way it seems to have, could this be a simple way
around the Debian packaging issues that we've been having? Then again,
if it were that simple, everyone would be doing it...

Cameron