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Unifying Linux Package Management
Job Diogenes Ribeiro Borges writes "The Smart Package Manager is an intelligent tool that works on the 'dependency hell' of software upgrading and installation on linux. Works with all major distributions (APT, APT-RPM, YUM, URPMI, etc), supporting multiple sources and technologies concurrently. Yes, you could install from multiple sources, from deb, rpm, tgz at same time! Smart Package Manager is being developed by Conectiva and is the tool that makes the Magic of CrossPlatform package management, behind the recently announced 'Four Linux Vendors Agree On An LSB Implementation.' You can get screenshots here (portuguese texts) and a README here."
The best way to answer this is to encourage you to go out and make a couple of both. But, I'll try to give you a couple starting points off the top of my head. Again, you really need to try them to see.
.orig and a .diff. The .orig should match the upstream md5sum, and the .diff is usually small enough to read easily. This has a number of benefits: For the paranoid it is much easier to see that debian is not introducting any security holes (if you know upstream are safe, then verifying the debian package is trivial). And in debugging it is easier to determine if a bug is in a debian extension or in upstream.
.... RPM has some of those but it doesn't have them all. As a package maintainer, having them all just makes life easy. Incidentially, this is an area gentoo goes better than Debian, but I digress.
1) Debian packages are distributed as a
2) (Technically, not an advantage to the deb format, more the tools). Debian packages obtain their version depends automatically, making the depends much more reliable. All debian packages are built by the autobuilders which start with a minimal install of debian and then only install the packages in the depends, thereby ensuring that the package will install and run with the depends that have been listed.
3) Debian packages have better support for depends, build-depends, conflicts, suggests, recommends, replaces,
4) RPM does version numbering based on either packages or files, and the automated tools make it easier to do version numbering based on files. This means that unless the package maker is skillful it is easy to end up in a RedHat equivilant of DLL hell. Generally the guys at redhat are smart enough to work around this deficiency in the file format, but it is still a problem.
5) Debian packages have a very nice handling of preinst, postinst, prerm, postrm. Having all those different scripts makes it easy for the package maintainer to do things elegantly where the RPM package maintaner has to do the same job as a bit of a hack. This is pretty much only noticed by users when something goes wrong.
6) Configuration options are handled by a standard mechanism and answers stored in a database. This all makes reconfiguration, reinstallation, transferring installation, etc. much easier. Similarly, when you upgrade, you are shown diffs of your configuration files and (new feature) can even have your modifications automatically added to the new version. RPM doesn't bother with this very much at all.
7) Virtual packages are not handled well by either format, but I would say the debian version is slightly better (because of Provides:).
8) Debian pacakges are built using standard tools (ar, tar, gzip). This means they can be created, extracted and the like on a non debian system. RPMs can be extracted using rpm2cpio, but I wouldn't like trying to create a rpm on a non redhat machine.
9) Logging of all actions is supported by deb, and you can have the logs emailed, etc. This is pretty pointless if you're just managing one machine, but with many sysadmins and many machines it is very nice. On second thought, this is more a tool benefit than a file-format benefit, so I better stop here...
Most of the deficencies in RPM can be masked by a skillful maintainer. If you build a good RPM it can be about as good as a good DEB. The key difference then is that building good RPMs is more work than building good DEBs because the debian file format contains the control structure that makes doing the job easy while the RPM format only contains the control structure that makes the job possible.
Most often the deficincies manifest themselves in userspace when you're using 3rd party RPMs. Because the package manager was not as experienced at making packages as a RH employee, the RPMs don't deal with version conflicts, depends and the like so elegantly. Contrast this with 3rd party DEBs and the file format m