Holy War(!): APT vs. RPM (was: Force apt-get to ignore dependencies?)

Joshua Judson Rosen rozzin at geekspace.com
Wed Mar 2 21:31:29 EST 2011


Benjamin Scott <dragonhawk at gmail.com> writes:
>
> On Sun, Feb 13, 2011 at 9:50 AM, Tom Buskey <tom at buskey.name> wrote:
> > It's nice/sad to see Debian getting the symptoms of RPM hell that people
> > always bring up.
> 
>   Debian -- or rather, dpkg/APT -- has always had the exact same
> behavior as RPM/YUM, it's just Debian bigots (who crawl out of the
> woodwork whenever package management is mentioned) were too blinded by
> zealotry to understand them.

I know this isn't what you're addressing here (and, for what it's worth,
I basically agree with you on the point you're making), but there /are/
actually some fairly deep differences in what RPM and dpkg do:
they chose very different answers for all sorts of `system policy'-type
questions like `do we use a binary database and provide a toolset
that should meet the admin needs, or do we store everything in
text-files that can be handled by existing text-manipulation tools'
and `during upgrade, do we uninstall the old version *before*
overwriting it with the new version, or *afterward*'.

There are corners where people care about things like that
at least quasi-legitimately, similarly to how/why they might
care about other system-policy issues.

Not that it really affects the `One True Way' arguments....


>   Both RPM and dpkg properly warn you if unmet dependencies exist.
> Both communities developed tools to solve dependencies for you.
> Debian came up with APT and put it into their distribution from an
> early age, which was a big win for Debian.  Kudos to them for that.
> RPM derived systems had several different tools for a long time, which
> meant the command(s) to use varied by distro and release.  You might
> use autorpm, rpmfind, up2date, etc.  It wasn't until much later that
> everyone standardized on YUM.
> 
>   Additionally: There have been (or were) more people building
> third-party RPMs for a long time.  Debian has long had the most
> "native" packages in their repository.  Debian has a very slow release
> cycle, so Debian people are more likely to be running similar systems.
>  Thus, Debian users were less likely to encounter a third-party
> package that had incompatible dependencies.
> 
> -- Ben
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