RE: [TCLUG:15263] Reading Red Hat rpms

[Scott <pope@ossuary.net>]

On Tue, 28 Mar 2000, Schlough, Mark wrote:

> What's missing/wrong with rpms?
> or 
> What's deb got that rpm doesn't

     It has nothing to do with .deb being better.  In my stance .deb's
have no standing at all.  My problem with rpm lies in the fact they're
very restrictive in where stuff can be installed (try using the flag
for a custom prefix sometime, it won't work 99% of the time), they're
distributed in a crazy base & devel scheme, and precompiled binaries
set up until recently for 386 procs don't thrill me.  Plus the goofy
way the stuff gets versioned, take a look at redhat's kernel updates
sometime (2.2.10-123812308912343244324 instead of 2.2.14 :P), is rather
messy.  I haven't dealt with .deb's much because on a whole I think
debian is a pretty poorly designed dist except for their version of
bsd's ports system, apt-get.  The only package format which I can truly
see myself liking is Stampede's.  Source & binary in one neat little file
which can be untar'd and recompiled.  For now though I'll stick to
plain tgz source.  If you're paying attention to where things get
installed, upgrading a prog with source is just as easy as a rpm.

Scott
-- ossuary.net -- 
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