On Wed, 10 Mar 1999 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > Ya know, I don't want to offend any of the developers or anything, but I'm > curious about something... Why is it that Debian is always the last to get > packages for any given product? When KDE came out, rpms were right around the > corner. This seems to be an ongoing trend... Is it just because the Debian > group is so quality concious? >
It is. There are always rpms sooner, but those rpms are invariably broken in minor ways, and since there are no "official" rpms and you don't know what the system they were built on was like, there's no guarantee they will work at all. Often dependencies are wrong and the like, and RPM's dependency tracking isn't as good to begin with. The Debian packages are maintained officially and strictly quality controlled by Debian policy and the "lintian" script. Also all the Gtk/Gnome/Imlib etc. packages are being prepared together in a staging area to be sure they work together properly. It's worth the wait, in short. Havoc