Re: [tlug] Mandrake vs. Red Hat

[Matt Gushee <mgushee@example.com>]

On Wed, Jun 05, 2002 at 01:37:36PM -0400, Josh Glover wrote:

> Come on, "everything else is better"!? Care to quantify or qualify that 
> statement in some way?
> 
> In my opinion, RPM is a much better system than dpkg / apt-foo.

Care to quantify or qualify *that* statement in some way?

Maybe it depends on what you expect from a packaging system. If you just
want to "install everything" and go, RPM probably is better. For me,
flexibility was a high priority, and I had always found RPM's
oversimplified dependency system very frustrating. Whereas Debian
dependencies are broken down into 'required', 'recommended', and
'suggested'--now, is that not a much better model of the real world than
RPM provides?

That was one of the main reasons I switched from RH to Debian. The
others, as I recall, were that Debian seems to take much more care to
ensure that the software actually works before calling it ready to
release, and that exim is the default MTA, so I could dump Sendmail
without too much struggle.

So what is it that you think is so great about RPM, anyway?

-- 
Matt Gushee
Englewood, Colorado, USA
mgushee@example.com
http://www.havenrock.com/