Bryan Paxton wrote:
> I've talked to a lot of ex-mandrake users who switched to debian simply for apt,
> and who also said they wouldn't gladly switch back if RPM was hacked up to be
> more robust, flexiable, and reliable as deb(dpkg,apt).
I for myself was once also a happy debian user.
But I changed to Red Hat and later to Mandrake
because of various reasons. Do not use this
as an argument, I know enough people who'd quit
with debian and are know using SuSE or Redhat.
> The first is a waste of time and man power IMHO.
As Debian reinvented the wheel with it's package format
some years ago, it was a waste of resources.
They could have also improved RPM instead. There were no
technical arguments to do otherwise, it was as
allways some political and emotional choise,
wasn't it?
> Debian's package system is right there to be used, why try to re-invent the
> wheel ? It just doesn't make sense to do so.
To reuse your words, it just doesn't make sense
to do otherwise.
> But what are the drawbacks ? Are there any at all ?
Yeah, of course, there allways are, aren't there?
Face it, RPM is mainstream, if you like it or not!
What I value is, I can go to any project homepage
and gladly find some rpms but rarly debs.
Software developer could use time better than
having to support different package formats
to distribute their software.
What Linux needs last is many package formats.
One it enough. And when you look at numbers
it's not deb. Of course it could be deb but
as the mojority of distributions and other
software projects goes with rpm it would'nt
be wise to switch to deb, better to improve
rpm.
What does the Linux Standard Project says
about this matter?
Cheers,
~Andreas
