Turning the scary big jump into many smaller safer jumps

• How about we feed those Debian packages into our Red Hat 7.1 based image a little bit at a time for each new image?

• Yes, that means building Debian packages, and converting them to rpm.

• This also means having both distributions be libc/binary compatible.

• Thankfully Ubuntu dapper was reasonably old, so we started by feeding libc 2.3.6 into our distro (replacing its libc 2.2.2)

• Then we wrote an alien-like script to unpack built debs from ProdNG, and repack them as RPMs (converting dependencies and changelogs).