Re: RPM vs DEB (was: melodrama at CentOS? > 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.
This is a misconception. RPM can handle dependencies perfectly well. I don't know how long the feature of "dependency checking" has been "refined" in RPM -- I don't know what value finding this out would prove anyway -- but the discussion at <http://www.advogato.org/article/306.html> from 2001 explains the confusion. Although the dependency criticism is a poor straw man, the misconception is probably deserved since Red Hat was slow in building 1) a network capable package frontend better than up2date and 2) a community-supported distribution. In history, Debian beat them on both fronts. "To the victor go the spoils". I'm not interested in debating this either, though. Instead, I've met more people who use RPM for their work than dpkg. Perhaps RPM is superior by being more practical and easier? Is there anyone here who actually uses dpkg for one's own packages or for unleashing changs to machines? Perhaps we can clear this up quickly. Honestly asking, /a
