Debian flamewar (was: OpenOffice doc...)

[Benjamin Scott]

On Wed, 9 Feb 2005, at 11:00pm, tbuskey at gmail.com wrote:
> Are there only the official Debian repositories or are there others that
> don't follow the Debian standards?

  One does see third-party packages for Debian, and even repositories, but
they're a lot less common then for, say, Red Hat/Fedora.  I suspect this is
mainly because it's a lot easier to get a package into Debian/sid, and once
it's in it's available to everyone almost immediately.  So there's just a
lot less call for it.

> In my hazy memories, I recall that RPM came after dpkg and was developed,
> in part, by the dpkg developer under hire from Redhat.

  I haven't heard that before, and from what I've read, that is at least
partly incorrect.  Not that I'm an expert or the information I have is
authoritative; far from it.  But from what I've read, dpkg was born in 1994.  
RPP, the distant ancestor to RPM, was born around the same time.  RPP was
followed by PMS, then PM.  Finally, RPM officially debuted in 1995 with Red
Hat Linux 2.0.

  Of course, none of this precludes learning lessons from Debian.  
Certainly, RPM came well after dpkg did.

References:

http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/project-history/ch-releases.en.html
http://www.debian.or.jp/events/2002/0919-lc2002/JP-Enkai-History.html
http://rikers.org/rpmbook/node9.html
http://www.owlriver.com/RH-true-names.html

-- 
Ben Scott <bscott at ntisys.com>
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