as some know i was going to write a full tutorial about it in the same way as void has done for apt for red hat, but i am sorry to say that it isn't going to happen in the near future. not from me anyway. yes, apt and apt-devel are both available for mandrake, and yes you might be able to use non mandrake versions. and as far as i know the source code is all available (actually i might write the tutorial purely using source rpms, but don't hold your breath) but the mandrake rpms are such a shambles! version 0.3 here, version 0.5 there. i can't find any apt-devel later than 0.3, but i cannot upgrade apt to 0.5 (which it needs to be to get synaptic to work) since there is no 0.5 of apt-devel... Also no matter how hard i keep trying to stick to mandrake only rpms, i ocassionally fall over these 'dependencies' like having to have libglade, GTK+2 and libc6 installed (i have them all installed, but the rpms do not know that as they have obviously not been compiled on a mandrake system).
now, i'm just going to post the notes i was making before i gave up in case they are helpful to anybody else, and i might read up on how to properly deal with SRPMs and come back to this later using source only rpms. i was also going to use the neat trick of installing apt and apt-devel and then use 'apt-get install synaptic' but no dice, it seems the mandrake repositories are knacked (which does me no good even if i can get the thing to install) and they have no knowledge of that (or some other fairly normal) package(s).
here are the notes:
http://rpmseek.com/rpm-pl/apt.html?hl=c ... t:PR:0:0:0
is the url to get apt
http://rpmseek.com/rpm-dl/apt-devel-0.3 ... 0:0:365587
is the url to get apt-devel
or else:
rpm -Uvh ftp://rpmfind.net/linux/Mandrake-devel/ ... k.i586.rpm
rpm -Uvh ftp://rpmfind.net/linux/Mandrake/9.0/co ... k.i586.rpm