Excerpts from linuxchix: 16-Dec-99 RE: [techtalk] X in Corel v.. by "Ian
Phillips"@tibco.com
> What's better about it? I know (roughly) how RPM works and what
> features it offers, but what advantages does dpkg give me?
One of the big things I like about debian is apt-get. No need to look
through an ftp site or cd for every package you want, just tell apt-get,
and it'll download it, find it on the cd, or wherever it's configured to
look. If there are unresolved dependencies, it'll also ask you if you
want to install them, and even give you the total size of the files.
Of the things specific to the packaging system:
divert: you can tell the package manager not to touch a file
old conffiles: dpkg asks you if you want to replace or keep an old
conffile (or diff them, or suspend dpkg), while rpm just replaces it
(keeping a backup).
dependencies: debs can depend on either a provides or a package name.
This is just an interface issue, but dpkg automatically removes old
versions of the same package, wheras with rpm you have to specify that
you're upgrading.
Debian also seems to handle both package upgrades and distribution
upgrades a bit more smoothly, but this is probably mostly apt.
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