Re: [users] Re: Time to fight for our beloved DEB format!
also sprach Matti Airas (on Sat, 30 Jun 2001 11:33:01PM +0300):
> While I agree that a million flies may be wrong, as far as I have
> understood, there are no significant functional differences between
> dpkg and rpm. Package dependencies may be declared explicitly in rpm
> as well, as well as functional dependencies (Requires: MTA). Debconf
> is not a package format issue, but a policy issue. While dpkg uses
> fairly robust text file format, rpm uses Berkeley DB's, which are
> very established as well, and somewhat faster and more compact than
> dpkg text files. Etc etc. Both packaging formats have their pros as
> well as cons. What ensures the high quality of Debian, is its
> policy. Still, a packaging format should not be seen as a religious
> issue.
i must admit that i am not particularly down with RPM, but the time
that i had to use it i remember as horrible. in fact, AFAIK, RPM
surely provide dependencies, but DEB has more - suggestions, and best
of all, classes (i.e. MTA). it makes perfect sense to stuff postfix,
qmail, exim, & co. into one class since they all do the same. i
remember that back in my redhat days, i had to force my way around
dependencies just because i wanted to run postfix or qmail rather than
our archaic beast sendmail. sure, i may be wrong here because my
breakthrough with package systems came with DEB, but i used to hate
RPMs -- not least because of their non-intuitive command line syntax
and other weirdities. e.g. dpkg -l <package> works beautifully whereas
with RPMs, you needed to rpm -qa | grep <package>, which i think is
ridiculous.
if RPMs are better than i see them, then please don't flame me. my
point is that my redhat and suse systems never used packages -- i went
tarball all the way because i could never get RPM to do what i wanted.
DEB, along with apt-get and dselect and what not was love at first
sight for me, and i would never even dream about doing it differently
anymore...
> 1) A transparent way to install LSB-compliant rpms in Debian is
> implemented. Preferably one should be able to install rpms with 'dpkg'
> command line tool, although an automatic format transform with 'alien'
> could be performed behind the scenes.
>
> 2) Assuming that I am not misinformed about the functional
> compatibility of dpkg and rpm, a LONG TERM goal for transforming
> Debian to rpm base is issued. This would include adding rpm support
> for all Debian package management tools, and transition tools for the
> database contents, etc.
sure, that would be a possiblity, but rather than merging and going
with redhat (come on, they are walking micro$oft footsteps), DEB is
very powerful and can easily exist by itself. a little
cross-compatibility is needed, but rather than surrendering and
converting to RPM, it should be the community's goal to establish DEB
at least to be a second standard, causing vendors and distributors to
package with DEB as well as RPM.
just my 2 pfennige. i would really hate to see DEB go away.
martin; (greetings from the heart of the sun.)
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