Imagine you want to create hdlist/sysnthesis files from a bunch of rpms on a debian system. If you know what you need it is not actually that difficult. The mandriva svn contains the tool genhdlist2. To use it on a debian machine we need to download and install two perl modules that are contained in the same directory as above, namely, perl-URPMI and MDV-Packdrakeng. The tool we want to use is in the rpmtools directory. You can svn checkout everything from http://svn.mandriva.com/svn/soft/rpm .
Once downloaded everything you would either need to install these perl libraries system-wide (bad idea…) or locally and to fiddle a bit with the genhdlist2 script in order to specify the location of these two libraries. Personally I added these two lines at the beginning of the file :
use lib '/tmp/perl-URPM/trunk/blib/lib';
use lib '/tmp/MDV-Packdrakeng/trunk/lib';
Make also sure that you compile the URPMI.so component of the perl library and copy it to the lib directory.
Now you are ready to generate your hdlist/systhesis files just by
giving a directory with all the rpms to the tool as in
perl genhdlist2 rpms
et voila.
Update
I’ve committed the script and supporting modules here if you are interested. To access the forge you need a username/password: you can use mancoosi/mancoosi if you want anonymous access.