On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 3:52 AM, Aaron S. Hawley<[email protected]> wrote: > 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.
It really depends on who you ask. The main reasons I see people using RPM are: * RHEL and CentOS are and have been standard offerings for hosting providers. Red Hat was quite aggressive at getting into ISPs and hosting services early, and thus there are a lot of sysadmins who became very familiar with it. When they no longer wanted to pay for Red Hat support, they went to CentOS. In the past 4 years, I've noticed that hosting providers are gradually offerring more distro choices, but RHEL and CentOS still remain as standard offerings. (A fact that irks me to no end, as their LTS means that the PHP available is typically *years* out of date.) * Never underestimate the power of certification. While certification may not be the best measure of an individual's actual ability with the given technology, it does mean that for that given technology, there will be (a) a group of professionals that have the certification, and (b) jobs that require the certification. Again, Red Hat very aggressively marketed the RHCE, and so, again, you have a body of RHCEs out there working as sysadmins. My experience is that Debian and Debian-based distros tend to be used by experienced sysadmins who manage their *own* (i.e., corporate LANs, or corporate, non-hosted web farms) networks of machines. Having managed both RPM and DEB based systems myself, I have a personal preference for DEB -- apt-get and aptitude are light years ahead of up2date and yum, and I have yet to have an issue with dependencies I couldn't easily resolve. RPM, on the other hand, causes me no end of issues every single time I touch it it seems. -- Matthew Weier O'Phinney [email protected] http://weierophinney.net/matthew/
