hi. First Emacs vs VI and now...DEB vs RPM... are the VAGUERS restless!
To me, the most relevant distinction is the system policy of Dependency Checking in Debian. For the longest time, RPM based distros did no meaningful dependency checking (meaning that an RPM was just a glorified tar.gz file). Now RPMs have _started_ supporting dependency checking, but Debian has had many years to refine the process and tools and Canonical has pushed developments in this area even further with Ubuntu.
Having run RedHat and Debian systems in both Desktop and Server configurations, I have come to vastly prefer The Debian Way. It is usually just easier to use. My conclusion in no way discounts the hard work and efforts of those who build GNU/Linux distributions using RPM, tar.gz, or whatnot--- it merely indicates my preference.
I seem to recall a rather loud bit of noise back in the Pre-RedHat-IPO days when people were building the software for RPMs... one of the stated goals was to support dependency checking. Apparently, the implementation of that goal was left out in the cold for a long, long time, as RPMs have only recently begun to offer the same level of Dependency checking as a DEB. And, again, only recently have tools like YUM really come into their own on RPM based systems. Debian has had dpkg, apt and now more recently aptitude, since the proverbial epoch...
Dependency checking needs to be done. Asking end-users to do dependency checking, is in my opinion, extremely harmful to adoption. Different distributions approach this problem differently, but it is the central problem of a distribution. While identifying software and library dependencies is a favored sport of some system administrators, from a usability point of view, it is not OK to ask users to perform the dependency checking themselves. Just because a certain popular operating system sometimes requires a priori knowledge of dependencies, does not make it a good idea to foist that work on end users who have no expertise to resolve the dependency in the first place. This kind of problem is especially acute when a dependency is merely *implied* by the packager.
I'll break off my argument here, just before it turns into a proselyting bit for The One True Debian Way :D
Just my $0.25. have a day.yad jdpf
