Re: DEB vs RPM

[jdassen@wi.leidenuniv.nl]

On Tue, Sep 29, 1998 at 12:28:57AM +1000, Shao Ying Zhang wrote:
> 	Lots people have told me that there are more deb packages than
> rpm. But just by looking at the web site rufus.w3.org/linux/RPM/, they
> have 10434 packages listed.

AFAIK, this count include different versions, ports to non-i386 machines,
source RPMs, libc5 + libc6 version of just about everything, etc. Also, the
bigger part of these are not supported by Red Hat in any way.

As such, I don't think this says more than "there are a lot of .rpm files
around".

> 	Now, do we have this number of deb packages??

The .deb count is probably somewhere in the 2000-2500 range (calculate from
debian/dists/unstable/*/binary-i386/Packages.gz for precise numbers).

> 	Anyway, we can always install RPM in our debian system. But my
> concern is: Will it stuff up the dpkg system??

If you install it with "rpm", in all likeliness, yes. If you use "alien",
probably not (unless it's an RPM of a critical system component).

HTH,
Ray
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