Debian flamewar (was: OpenOffice doc...)

Tom Buskey tbuskey at gmail.com
Wed Feb 9 23:01:01 EST 2005


On Wed, 9 Feb 2005 22:42:15 -0500 (EST), Benjamin Scott
<bscott at ntisys.com> wrote:
> 
>   I've never, ever been that impressed by the functionality of apt-get vs
> anything else.  Yes, it manages package dependencies.  So do/did yum,
> up2date, rpmfind, and autorpm.  I've been having my RPM dependencies solved
> for me for years and years.  It just really ain't all that impressive.  Get
> over yourselves.

Mandrake's rpmdrake too.  I've wondered why people refer to the RPM
dependency thing so much.  It's not the packaging that does it.  It's
the repository.  Solaris freeware packages can be just as consistant
or not.  There are lots of people making/using RPM packages.  And
several distributions (Redhat, fedora, Mandrake, SuSE).  How does this
compare to .deb?  (btw - I haven't used Debian beyond an install). 
Are there only the official Debian repositories or are there others
that don't follow the Debian standards?


>   I've used both dpkg and rpm, and IMNSHO, I think rpm is the better of the
> two.  Some operations are a lot faster, and others are just a lot nicer to
> use ("rpm -V" and "rpm -Uvh", for example).  And the build tools and source
> management of rpm blow away Debian's offerings.  Or they did when I last
> looked at them, which was admittedly a few years ago.  But given Debian's
> rate of change, I don't expect it's that much different.

In my hazy memories, I recall that RPM came after dpkg and was
developed, in part, by the dpkg developer under hire from Redhat. 
Naturally, he improved on some things in the .deb packaging.  In any
event, .deb came before rpm and rpm learned from deb.



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