Anti-Debian Discruimination (was: DEB vs RPM)

["David McNab" <david@rebirthing.co.nz>]

>From my short time with Debian so far, I sense that there may be some
discrimination against the debian platform. The excerpt below is one
dramatic instance.

Can someone please comment further about anti-debian discrimination?

Also, how much success have people had with the 'alien' utility for
converting .rpm to .deb? I've heard people saying that 'alien' is pretty
evil and can seriously screw up a debian installation.

Cheers
David


From: Miaoling Chiu <chiu_miaoling@yahoo.com>


> I just received my September issue of LinuxFormat
> Magazine. The following from page 62 should be of
> interest to this group:
>
> RPMs in, DEBs out
>
> LINUX STANDARDS BOARDS SETTLES ON RPM
>
> The Linux Standards Board has recently released
> 1.0 of the LSB specification, and have agreed on
> RPM as the standard package format. This has
> naturally caused consternation and friction in the
> Debian community.
>
> There has been a long standing - and heated -
> dicussion on the relative merits of RPM's and
> DEB's. While RPM appear to be supported in more
> distributions than DEB, it seems that a DEB-based
> system is more reliable when upgrading and
> updating distributions. Debian has long hailed
> it's apt-get technology, and many users find it
> superior to RPM's.
>
> The true key to the success of DEB packages has
> not been in apt, but in the packages themselves
> and the fact that they conform to strict Debian
> policy, and hence have dependency information
> correctly identified. Whether a similar policy
> would be applied to RPM seems unclear, although if
> they are to be as reliable as DEB's a policy may
> be needed. Successful standardisation usually
> relies on enforcement of policy and procedure, and
> this seems to be the case here.
>
> The decision is a key move for Linux developers
> and distributors and should make distribution and,
> crucially, installation of software a much easier
> proposition.
>
>
>
> __________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> Make international calls for as low as $.04/minute with Yahoo!
Messenger
> http://phonecard.yahoo.com/
>
>
> --
> To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-request@lists.debian.org
> with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact
listmaster@lists.debian.org
>