Re: why .deb?

[Paul Seelig <pseelig@mail.uni-mainz.de>]

Marc.Haber-lists@gmx.de (Marc Haber) writes:

> He said one of the major reasons why he still uses SuSE is the
> "strange packet format" that Debian uses.
> 
Apart from all the babble surrounding the different packaging formats
regarding their technical and political merits there is one single
fact which makes me glad we didn't switch to join the RPM race.  This
is the outstanding feature, that any official .deb package can usually
be considered consistent enough (dependency issues aside) for dropping
it into a Debian system.

The one big problem with the common packaging standard RPM is simply
that everyone is fulfilling the standard within their own restricted
boundaries.  This mostly results in incompatible .rpm packages between
e.g. Redhat, SuSE and possibly any third or fourth party.  Redhat's
.rpm don't take into account the somewhat strange file system layout
of SuSE and vice versa.  So people randomly downloading and installing
whatever has the familiar sounding ending .rpm not seldomly run into
big trouble.

Apart from this the lack of a proper quality control for the so called
contrib packages turned out to be reason enough for Redhat to somewhat
adopt something simliar to the Debian development scheme by making
third party contributors register in oder to assure some more quality
control even for contributed packages.  One of Debian's big strength
is the range of officially supported quality packages which supposedly
is unsurpassed by any other of the larger distributions.  

The german distribution SuSE (which is the most popular and widespread
one in Germany) for example only offers some 1064 binary .rpm packages
in their current release 6.0, whereas Debian offers more than 1700 .deb
binaries in hamm and far more than 2000 (2300?) in the upcoming slink.
Beat this! :-)

The main point of our own packaging format for me is consistency.

                             Cheers, P. *8^)
-- 
   --------- Paul Seelig <pseelig@goofy.zdv.uni-mainz.de> -----------
   African Music Archive - Institute for Ethnology and Africa Studies
   Johannes Gutenberg-University   -  Forum 6  -  55099 Mainz/Germany
   ------------------- http://ntama.uni-mainz.de --------------------