At 08:22 -0800 1998-11-20, Joseph Carter wrote:
Redhat's source packages have advantages over Debian's? What the HELL have you been smoking? Debian's source packages are pristine upstream tarball, easily viewable diff file, and a PGP signed md5sum file telling you what the package does! Redhat's source packages are a proprietary file format requiring custom tools and you have source and patches already applied, leaving you pretty much to trust the person who packaged the thing not to have put anything nasty in there, intentionally or not.
Wrong, SRPMs usually have at least an upstream tarball (even .tar.Z or .tar.bz2) and many have several separate patches, a package that comes as several tarballs (glibc) can also be handled.
The only real problem I have with SRPMs is the .spec file format and the fact that one needs 'rpm2cpio.pl' at the very least to unpack one.
-- Joel Klecker (aka Espy) <URL:http://web.espy.org/> <URL:mailto:jk@espy.org> <URL:mailto:espy@debian.org> Debian GNU/Linux PowerPC -- <URL:http://www.debian.org/ports/powerpc/>