[PLUG] common package format

[Rahul Sundaram]

( अमेय पाळंदे ) Ameya Palande wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> I know that there are various package formats in current linux
> distributions.
> 
> redhat, mandrake, suse - rpm
> debian, [kx]ubuntu - deb
> 
> Everybody knows that debian's package management is far better than rpm.

Everybody? That's rather presumptuous. Maybe explaining why would be a 
good starting point.

> 
> Redhat nerver had good package management.
> Suse is fighting with zen and yast package management.
> 
> Everything in debian is free.
> Why redhat & suse just adopt .deb and debian's package management system ?
> Ubuntu is good example of this strategy which is very much successful.
> Instead of doing this redhat and suse are putting efforts for developing
> good package management and upgrade system.
> 
> Any views ?

Just to clear a few things. The usual comparisons around RPM vs apt-get 
are just plain wrong and comparing apples vs oranges. RPM as a file 
format supports several additional features like ability to list 
multiple patches independently in the spec file, multi lib etc. It also 
supported gpg signed updates long before other formats did. RPM a a tool 
is comparable to dkpg and not apt-get. RPM is also part of the base LSB 
standard. Up2date which does automatic dependency resolving has been 
installed by default in Red Hat systems for a long time.

Apt-get has been ported to RPM and is available for all RPM based 
distributions usually within the repositories itself these days.

http://apt-rpm.org/index.shtml

Same for yum.

http://linux.duke.edu/projects/yum/

Rahul