Petreley on apt-get vs. RPM

cagrin wrote to us with a recent Nick Petreley feature on LinuxWorld. In this feature, he writes about one of my most favorite parts about Linux: Debian and apt-get. He's advocating that Debian become the standard for Linux, as RPM doesn't cut the mustard compared to apt-get. Now, granted, I've been able to blow up my machine before with reckless apt-get dist-upgrade -- but that's running unstable, and my own fault. Apt-get rocks.

Comments

Binary patches would be nice

[DrXym]

I would be happy if the vendors would start shipping certain updates as binary patches.

A recent security recent hole in Mandrake required I download about 40Mb of GLIBC RPMs! Why??? The fix itself was probably a few changed lines in the source code so why not distribute it as a binary patch? The alternative for modem users is a 3 hour download, something only masochists will bother doing.

The _REAL_ difference

[CarrotLord]

is not actually the fact that apt-get is not comparable to RPM, but the fact that Debian has a strict policy on package dependencies. The main difficulty with porting apt-get to RPM (and in fact, the main difficulty with any automated system for RPM) is that there are no standards about how to make your rpms. You just do it whatever way you wnat. RedHat themselves don't conform to the LSB filesystem standard, which doesn't help. IMHO, any packaging system must have complete and strict dependencies, and policies on these so that a package is not valid unless it's correct and pretty damned complete, and it must comply with the LSB as much as practicable. Debian does this, no RPM distros do. Hence, Debian is easier to maintain.

rr