[ale] deb and rpm

[Fulton Green]

I'm much more well-versed with the RPM format, particularly under Red Hat
(which makes up the "R" in RPM, of course). It's decent enough. Sometimes
having a dependency which has a dependency which has, etc. can be tough to
deal with (when you have to upgrade, say, fifty packages all at once since
one would break several others and so forth). Then again, it does allow a
--force option, but I don't recommend it unless you know for sure how the
failed dependency(ies) will affect your new/upgraded pkg.

Slackware is a totally different beast. Its packages are basically a tarball
(.tar.gz) format. What makes Slack packages tick is a directory in the
tarball called INSTALL underneath which reside one or more configuration
scripts. If I had to guess, I'd say that those scripts actually allow
interactive configuration, whereas RPM seems to be batch-only. But with
Slack pkgs being tarball format, it would seem that it has the potential to
overwrite critical config files (particularly those in /etc), which could
mess things up. Then again, if you're looking for a good Linux learning
experience, that could be a good thing.

All that said, I bought the Debian 2.2 (Potato) distro at ALS, and plan to
try it out on my doorstop-quality notebook. If that works out, I'll put the
latest Mozilla on it and hand it off to a friend that's currently job
hunting, but has no computer (and has only used Windows prior).

On Mon, Oct 16, 2000 at 08:26:25AM -0400, Stephen Pellicer wrote:
> I do not want some sort of holy war to break out over this. I do not
> want people convincing me of which of these to use. I only want some
> _objective_ differences in the package formats. Looking over them they
> seem very familiar and I am not quite as familiar with deb so I wanted
> to know how it differs from rpm. I will promptly ignore any comments
> that state how one feature is better in one implementation than
> another. I also don't want to hear how I should just build everything
> from tarballs and install from there. I just want some information and
> every time I try to talk to someone about something like this, it ends
> up being a zealous rant on which way of distributing software is
> better. I just would like an implementation comparison.
> 
> Stephen
> 
> PS sorry for the cautious tone in the e-mail but it has been my
> experience that this is a touchy subject.
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