>> "MH" == Marc Haber <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: MH> I don't know the historical reasons, but why does Debian have its MH> .deb format? Does .deb have major advantages over .rpm?
dpkg was developed before rpm, in fact before .deb, there the distributions used .tar.gz files. Debian packages was the first package format that had meta-information. Bruce once suggested a move to rpm, but the developers believe dpkg is the better system. See http://kitenet.net/%7Ejoey/pkg-comp.html for a comparision. Also rpm doesn't really give you an advantage. You will run int trouble if you believe you can mix Suse, Redhat and Caldera packages. So you are still mostly stuck with the packages the distribution offers. And Debian offers more of them than any other distribution. You can also use alien to convert between the package formats. Ciao, Martin