> It really depends on who you ask. [...] It could be the case that more sysadmins use RPM-based distros. Another historical reason you could have mentioned is the likely scenario where people had to figure out the RPM tools because they wanted to install a package that wasn't available.
> 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. This sounds like the "misconception", again. Also, I take your response as a "No", you haven't used dpkg to do what's described at <http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-debpkg.html> or <http://www.debian.org/doc/maint-guide/> or <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PackagingGuide>" You've only used the frontends. This time, I'm quoting the discussion about RPM dependencies I referenced in my last mail below. Like most others, I believe Apt is superior. But, I'm not comparing Apt over Yum. I believe dpkg to be grossly cumbersome for simple tasks over RPM. Even the Debian maintainer's guide suggests using a tarball install when installing a package the first time. That's not what the Fedora maintainer's guide suggests. "[...] RPMs do not inherently cause dependency problems. They have enough information in them to avoid that problem. Difficulties arise when you start combining RPMs from different sources, because different sources have different naming conventions and packaging policies. So the libc5 package from RH happens to have X libraries compiled against libc5, the one from contrib doesn't, and the one from SuSE is named something else entirely. "This is not just a problem with RPM-based distributions, just more apparent because there are more RPM-based distros and when most people thing .deb, they think of packages from Debian (which have nice firm policy behind them to make them consistent). But you can already start to see this problem with Debian-based distributions: I have a friend who uses Libranet, has some of Ximian GNOME, and potato in his apt sources. It's messed up enough that we couldn't get apt to install any gnome dev packages (ie, headers and static libraries) because the dependencies from different distributions conflicted." Another commenter said, "The RPM format doesn't have any more dependency problems than the .deb format. The problem is that most RPM distributions don't have an apt-get watching over their shoulder and alerting them to every mistake."
