also sprach Matti Airas (on Sat, 30 Jun 2001 11:33:01PM +0300): > While I agree that a million flies may be wrong, as far as I have > understood, there are no significant functional differences between > dpkg and rpm. Package dependencies may be declared explicitly in rpm > as well, as well as functional dependencies (Requires: MTA). Debconf > is not a package format issue, but a policy issue. While dpkg uses > fairly robust text file format, rpm uses Berkeley DB's, which are > very established as well, and somewhat faster and more compact than > dpkg text files. Etc etc. Both packaging formats have their pros as > well as cons. What ensures the high quality of Debian, is its > policy. Still, a packaging format should not be seen as a religious > issue.
i must admit that i am not particularly down with RPM, but the time that i had to use it i remember as horrible. in fact, AFAIK, RPM surely provide dependencies, but DEB has more - suggestions, and best of all, classes (i.e. MTA). it makes perfect sense to stuff postfix, qmail, exim, & co. into one class since they all do the same. i remember that back in my redhat days, i had to force my way around dependencies just because i wanted to run postfix or qmail rather than our archaic beast sendmail. sure, i may be wrong here because my breakthrough with package systems came with DEB, but i used to hate RPMs -- not least because of their non-intuitive command line syntax and other weirdities. e.g. dpkg -l <package> works beautifully whereas with RPMs, you needed to rpm -qa | grep <package>, which i think is ridiculous. if RPMs are better than i see them, then please don't flame me. my point is that my redhat and suse systems never used packages -- i went tarball all the way because i could never get RPM to do what i wanted. DEB, along with apt-get and dselect and what not was love at first sight for me, and i would never even dream about doing it differently anymore... > 1) A transparent way to install LSB-compliant rpms in Debian is > implemented. Preferably one should be able to install rpms with 'dpkg' > command line tool, although an automatic format transform with 'alien' > could be performed behind the scenes. > > 2) Assuming that I am not misinformed about the functional > compatibility of dpkg and rpm, a LONG TERM goal for transforming > Debian to rpm base is issued. This would include adding rpm support > for all Debian package management tools, and transition tools for the > database contents, etc. sure, that would be a possiblity, but rather than merging and going with redhat (come on, they are walking micro$oft footsteps), DEB is very powerful and can easily exist by itself. a little cross-compatibility is needed, but rather than surrendering and converting to RPM, it should be the community's goal to establish DEB at least to be a second standard, causing vendors and distributors to package with DEB as well as RPM. just my 2 pfennige. i would really hate to see DEB go away. martin; (greetings from the heart of the sun.) \____ echo mailto: !#^."<*>"|tr "<*> mailto:"; [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- no cat has eight tails. a cat has one tail more than no cat. therefore, a cat has nine tails.
