rpm vs deb

[samon]

I hear always people saying keep away from dits with rpm, can anybody tell me why? I've tried already redhat and debian and both r similar, dependencies and so on.
what about slackware? I guess they have their own packages like debian.

[usual]

debs are superior to rpm and slackware sucks. I know this doesn't help you much but I have only been out of bed for 3 minutes and I only slept for 3 hours.

[Ludootje]

You have dependancies with both rpms&debs, when you use "rpm" & "dpkg". Though, when you use redcarpet for rpms (don't use it, it's crap), afaik it d/l's all the rpms needed. When you use apt for debs, there's no problem with dependancies, because apt d/l's all the apps needed by the specific app you want.
As for slackware, it has it's own package management system. It compile from sources the app you want, but it doesn't:
1. d/l the apps needed by your app so it would work
2. tells you which other apps are needed
I personally love apt, and apparently emerge (gentoo's packagement system, which works like apt though compiles from sources) is nice too, I hope it has as much apps in it's db as apt has.

[Jomboni]

Right. Red Carpet is good (don't listen to Ludhtkjowetwetwer), the only problem is that it doesn't have a very wide varierty of programs available for it, and sometimes it will try and replace your newer version of a package with it's older version (of course, it never forces you do to such a thing!)

And I don't know if rpm-get is available for all distros, but it is for RH 7.2 and you can get it at http://enigma.freshrpms.net. It's also great, but again, the main problem is that the available packages aren't nearly as numerous as they'd be for debian.

[Dr. Lucky]

I've been dipleased with RPMs... I've been running 7.2 for five months now, and i can't stand rpms. I usually have more luck compiling the programs from source than using rpms.
I won't let me uninstall the SDL that came with it.
It won't handle dependencies right (it won't see that i have the right stuff)
and conflicting dependencies aren't handled well, either

when deb woody comes out, I'm gonna give it a shot. apt-get looks supa-kewl.

-Dr Lucky

[Strike]

RPMs have one flaw that stands out above the rest, and is (IMO) incredibly moronic, stupid, and fatal to the packaging system in general. That flaw is: file-based dependencies.

When the touch command can be used to easily break dependencies in your package system, you know something is wrong. Also, the problem of many packages providing the same file but being unsure of what package the original package intended to use is a problem that still persists. The right way to do things is to depend on names of packages and have an official package repository, possibly even checking MD5 sums of packages to make sure that they are the package requested (though this leads to versioning problems ... which is another thing file-based dependencies screw up).