Re: why .deb?

[martin@internet-treff.uni-koeln.de (Martin Bialasinski)]

>> "MH" == Marc Haber <Marc.Haber-lists@gmx.de> writes:

MH> I don't know the historical reasons, but why does Debian have its
MH> .deb format? Does .deb have major advantages over .rpm?

dpkg was developed before rpm, in fact before .deb, there the
distributions used .tar.gz files. Debian packages was the first package 
format that had meta-information. 

Bruce once suggested a move to rpm, but the developers believe dpkg is 
the better system.

See http://kitenet.net/%7Ejoey/pkg-comp.html for a comparision.

Also rpm doesn't really give you an advantage. You will run int
trouble if you believe you can mix Suse, Redhat and Caldera
packages. So you are still mostly stuck with the packages the
distribution offers. And Debian offers more of them than any other
distribution. 

You can also use alien to convert between the package formats.

Ciao,
	Martin